Dart

History

• 2019-Nov-26 Set up at home and upgraded to Debian Buster (10.2)
• 2016-09-09 Added intel-microcode package, was getting perf_event_intel: PEBS disabled due to CPU errata, please upgrade microcode
• 2016-09-08 Upgraded to Debian 8.5
• 2016-03-27 Lost one of the 3TB drives.
• 2015-Jul-02 Connected eth1 to Vastra2
• 2015-Feb-27 -- Bringing online again after months of storage as we moved to California.
• 2014-May -- Shut down for move.
• 2014- regrooved with Debian 7
• 2014- Brought up with CentOS to allow running ESRI ArcGIS Server

RAID commands

My controller is a 3Ware 9260-8i with firmware 3.27.00 The controller is 1000:0079, MegaRaidSAS http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/LSIMegaRAIDSAS

The drive is a WDC WD30EFRX "Red".

I have not gotten the RAID command line program running yet on this OS (Debian 8).

At boot time, you can type Ctl-Y when prompted to bring up a command prompt. "$" There is no "help" option -- I found some scant documentation online, here are references

https://supportforums.cisco.com/document/62901/megacli-common-commands-and-procedures

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/archive/index.php?t-277864.html

When a drive failed, I had to turn off the ALARM! It's LOUD, you can't miss it. It beeps once per second to tell you a drive is gone.

I have only one controller so I can use -aALL or -a0

Silencing the alarm

AdpSetProp AlarmSilence -a0
AdpSetProp AlarmDsbl -a0

Replacing the drive

There is a walk through on this page: https://supportforums.cisco.com/document/62901/megacli-common-commands-and-procedures

[E:S]  =  Enclosure:Slot

Get information

adpallinfo -a0
encinfo -a0
ldinfo -lall -a0
pdlistt -a0

Mark drive as missing

PDOffline -PhysDrv [E:S] -a0 
PDMarkMissing -PhysDrv [E:S] -a0 
PDPrpRmv -PhysDrv [E:S] -a0

Replace the drive

Rebuild

PdReplaceMissing -PhysDrv [E:S] -ArrayN -rowN -a0
PDRbld -Start -PhysDrv [E:S] -a0

Re-enable the alarm

AdpSetProp AlarmEnbl -a0

Hardware

• Supermicro server case
• Supermicro motherboard X9 something or other
• Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz processor (8 hyperthreaded cores, appears as 16 cpu's) 63998.21 BogoMIPS
• 32GB RAM: 4x KVR16R11D4K4/32 DDR3 1600 Registered ECC (there are 4 empty slots)
• 240G SSD x 2 for the OS Corsair Neutron GTX (2012)
• 3Ware LSI RAID controller good for 8 drives
• 7 WDC 3TB 5900 RPM Red disk drives

There's an "OCZ Revo" card which appears as 2 55G drives for SWAP space, because I have no idea what else to do with that thing. :-)

SSD configuration

The SSD drives are already configured as RAID 1 so I am sticking with that.

LSI RAID configuration

Currently all 7 Red drives are in a RAID 6, which gives a total of about 14TB available space (before formatting). The problem is the Red drives are only 5900 rpm and I happen to have some spare unused 7200 rpm drives.

I could do two arrays and two logical drives or I could mix the drives in one array.

• RAID 1 (2 2TB 7200 rpm drives) + RAID 5 (5 3TB drives) = 14TB
• RAID 10 (4 mixed speed drives) + RAID 5 (3 3TB drives) = 10 TB
• RAID 50 (6 mixed speed drives + 1 spare) = 6TB

I think that mixing fast and slow drives will pull performance down so my inclination is to go with the first option, putting PostgreSQL onto the RAID 1 and using the RAID 5 for bulky things like backups and media.

Network

• eth0/br0 192.168.2.236 -- used by Dart and KVM virtual machines hub and quail
• eth1 10.10.10.1 -- unused presently

Software

• Debian 7
• mediawiki
• postfix not exim4

Postfix

Email is supported via Wildsong at the moment. That is, mail originates @wildsong.biz

• smarthost using gmail, because I use gmail for the Wildsong and Geo-CEG domains.
• sasl auth is needed to talk gmail

Mediawiki + MySQL

I decided to go w/ MySQL because of support issues (MySQL is sort of the "official" database of mediawiki), this means running both MySQL and PostgreSQL on Dart. Dart has lots of memory and the machine's not doing much anyway... The main reason I install PostgresSQL on Dart is for PostGIS.

Installing mysql means I install other stuff. Installing mediawiki calls for a few things too.

apt-get install mysql-server phpmyadmin postfix-mysql
apt-get install php-apc git

With MediaWiki, along come my favorite extensions.

PostgreSQL

I will probably run PostgreSQL and friends in Docker so this is outdated. The pain of PostGIS installation on the host outweighs any minor performance gain. I do have to make sure the data ends up on the correct logical drive on the host!

Anyway if I wanted to install on the host it would require adding a repo to get a more recent version. In days of yore the commands would have been

echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ wheezy-pgdg main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list
wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | apt-key add -
apt-get update 
apt-get install postgresql-9.4

2015-Feb-27

I packed up Dart last May (2014) shortly after re-installing the operating system and switching to Debian. Now I am trying to pick up the pieces. There is no Web server right now! Zow! How can that be?

I do remember I gave up on CentOS when I found out how impractical it was to try to run my own copy of ESRI ArcGIS Server after I lost (free) access to a developer license.