Testbed Update Plan
Planning the update of the middleware/development test bed
There is a number of tasks involved in bringing the testbed to where we like to be. We also need to agree on a timeframe in which we like to see these things accomplished.
inventory of current services
This section should list the current services we run and use on the testbeds. For each service, we should explain what we should like to do with it (keep, drop, change?).
| Service | System | keep/move/lose | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| LDAP | span | lose | to be discontinued after migration to central LDAP |
| DHCP | span | move | by dnsmasq, /etc/hosts and /etc/ethers. Should migrate elsewhere |
| Cruisecontrol | bleek | move | build system for VL-e and BiG Grid |
| Hudson | kudde | move | continuous integration, currently for jGridstart but could serve others |
| Home directories | everywhere | move | should be merged onto single NFS server |
| X509 host keys and pre-generated SSH keys | span | move | all in /var/local/hostkeys |
Data plan for precious data
Precious means anything that took effort to put together, but nothing that lives in version control elsewhere. Think home directories, system configurations, pre-generated ssh host keys, X509 host certs, etc.
One idea is to put all of this on a box that is not involved in regular experimentation and messing about, and have backup arranged from this box to beerput. After this is arranged we begin to migrate precious data from all the other machines here, leaving the boxen in a state that we don't get sweaty palms over scratching and reinstalling them.
Hardware inventory
Perhaps this should be done first. Knowing what hardware we have is prerequisite to making sensible choices about what we try to run where.
| name | ipmi name* | type | chipset | #cores | mem | OS | disk | remarks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bleek | bleek | PE1950 | Intel 5150 @2.66GHz | 4 | 8GB | CentOS4-64 | software raid1 2×500GB disks | High Availability, dual power supply, to be renamed |
| toom | toom | PE1950 | Intel E5440 @2.83GHz | 8 | 16GB | CentOS5-64 | Hardware raid1 2×715GB disks | |
| kudde | kudde | PE1950 | Intel E5440 @2.83GHz | 8 | 16GB | CentOS5-64 | Hardware raid1 2×715GB disks | |
| span | span | PE2950 | Intel E5440 @2.83GHz | 8 | 24GB | CentOS5-64 | Hardware raid10 on 4×470GB disks (950GB net) | DHCP,DNS,NFS,LDAP |
| melkbus | melkbus | M600 | Intel E5450 @3.00GHz | 8 | 32GB | CentOS5-64 | 2x 320GB SAS disks | to be renamed |
| odin | odin | PE1950 | Intel 5150 @2.66GHz | 4 | 8GB | CentOS5-64 | software raid1 2×500GB disks | High Availability, dual power supply |
| put | n/a | PE2950 | former garitxako | |||||
| autana | blade-14 | M610 | to be renamed to ren | |||||
| arauca | blade-13 | M610 | to be renamed to mient | |||||
| arrone | n/a | PE1950 | to be renamed to voor; no IPMI | |||||
| aulnes | n/a | PE1950 | to be renamed to wiers; no IPMI | |||||
| ent | (no ipmi) | Mac Mini | Intel Core Duo @1.66GHz | 2 | 2GB | OS X 10.6 | SATA 80GB | OS X box (no virtualisation) |
- *ipmi name is used for IPMI access; use
<name>.ipmi.nikhef.nl. - System details such as serial numbers can be retrieved from the command line with
dmidecode -t 1.
IPMI serial-over-LAN
- can be done by
ipmitool -I lanplus -H name.ipmi.nikhef.nl -U user sol activate. - SOL access needs to be activated in the BIOS once, by setting console redirection through COM2.
For older systems that do not have a web interface for IPMI, the command-line version can be used. Install the OpenIPMI service so root can use ipmitool. Here is a sample of commands to add a user and give SOL access.
ipmitool user enable 5 ipmitool user set name 5 ctb ipmitool user set password 5 '<blah>' ipmitool channel setaccess 1 5 ipmi=on # make the user administrator (4) on channel 1. ipmitool user priv 5 4 1 ipmitool channel setaccess 1 5 callin=on ipmi=on link=on ipmitool sol payload enable 1 5
Network plan
All of the machines should be put in the P4CTB VLAN (vlan 2), which is covered by ACLs to prevent public access. This is a first line in defence against intrusions. In some cases we may like to run virtual machines in the open/experimental network (vlan 8); for that the trick is to create a second bridge with a tagged ethernet device in vlan 8: see /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.8
VLAN=yes DEVICE=eth0.8 BOOTPROTO=static ONBOOT=yes TYPE=Ethernet IPV6INIT=no IPV4INIT=no
Then: ifup eth0.8 and
brctl addbr broe brctl addif broe eth0.8
Unfortunately, the IPV6INIT=no doesn't help, it gets an IPv6 address anyway. This bridge can then be used to add virtual network devices for machines that live in open/experimental.
All systems have at least 1GB interface, but put has two which may be trunked. This could be useful for serving machine images. The blade systems have extra interfaces and may be capable of doing iSCSI offloading to the NIC.
TODO: draw a network lay-out.
IPv4 space is limited, and until the network upgrade (planned 2011Q1-3?) we're stuck with that. The current scheme of SNATting may help us out for a while.
LDAP migration
We're going to ditch our own directory service (it served us well, may it rest in peace) in favour of the central Nikhef service. This means changing user ids in some (all?) cases which should be done preferable in a single swell foop.
We should request to add a testbed 'service' to LDAP with ourselves as managers, so we can automatically populate /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.
