[GRLUG] Rocks running on top of RHEL

[Casey DuBois]

Greg,

Thanks for all the great information, the Linux clusters are coming out
of a major oil company that uses them for seismic modeling. They will
cycle clusters 2-3 times per year and use primarily HP or SGI gear
however the SuperMicro systems I have were part of a storage array and
were not of interest to my company so I was able to pick them up for
very little $$$.

I figured that the Supermicro motherboards would be supported but was
concerned about the 3Ware controllers. I checked the systems and you are
correct the 3Ware is only connected to 8 drive bays I do have x-tra
systems and could pirate another 3Ware card but am wondering if I would
be wasting my time. I guess I'll keep a couple to play with post the
rest on eBay and keep my eyes open for the next great deal.

Casey

-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Folkert [mailto:greg at gregfolkert.net] 
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 10:51 PM
To: grlug at grlug.org
Subject: Re: [GRLUG] Rocks running on top of RHEL

On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 15:57 -0500, Casey DuBois wrote:
> Ben,
> Thanks for the response these systems were originally hooked to a
> supercomputer cluster of 250+systems which must have been running
> Rocks on RHEL.  

A former Grid setup, huh. Did the company go belly up?

> System Details: SuperMicro SC942i-600 Systems with X5DPE-G2
> Motherboard, 4-U, Triple Redundant 600W Power Supply, CD, Dual 2.4GHz
> Xeon CPU, 4GB RAM, 1-80GB WD HDD, 3Ware 7506-8 ATA 133 Raid Controller
> Card, 15-Drive Bays-NO DRIVES.  

You are cool, The motherboard chipset is an Intel E7501 Chipset. Works
in Linux. Long time since it was added, 2.4.22 or so.

The 7506-8 3Ware controller is a go. They are the OLD 3Ware lines. Fully
supported since about 2.4.18 or maybe a bit earlier.

The Intel 82546EB Dual Port Gigabit Ethernet Controllers are Fully
supported by the e1000 module.

> I purchased these systems assuming that they did not have an OS and
> was planning on installing Linux, I do not need the Rocks cluster
> management software and like your idea about a more newbie-friendly OS
> like Ubuntu. I want to add drives to the 15-bays and use for network
> attached storage is there somewhere I can go to confirm drivers for
> the X5DPE-G2 motherboard and 3Ware 7506-8 ATA Raid Controller card
> before switching the OS?

You will have to add another controller to the machine in order to get
more then 8 drives off the 3Ware controller. It only supports one drive
per channel. One thing you have to remember, GRUB will not boot on an
Array of larger than 2TB from the 3ware controller. IOW, put a new boot
drive in it rather than the 80GB WD.

Also, update all firmware/BIOS on the Motherboard and the 3Ware
controller *BEFORE* installing anything. The 3Ware controller will not
support drives larger than 120GB without the firmware update.

> Someone much smarter than me has already set these systems up with the
> correct drivers and such which is why I was trying to use them as is,
> but I also want to expand my Linux skills.

Ubuntu will work just fine on the puppies. But, you should install the
server variant of Ubuntu, with only CLI stuff.
-- 
greg at gregfolkert.net

Novell's Directory Services is a competitive product to Microsoft's
Active Directory in much the same way that the Saturn V is a competitive
product to those dinky little model rockets that kids light off down at
the playfield. -- Thane Walkup