Disk Servers

fdisk doesn't like "big" disks. GNU Parted is better and can do things like cope with GPT disk labels, but it needs some scripting to make it easier. enter one uber-nasty script. Yes I know it doesn't do *any* sanity checking that you've run it on the right host, but hey, sysadmins never make mistakes :-)

cat mkpart.sh

echo "Running script on $1"
PARTED=/sbin/parted
DISK=/dev/sdb
ssh $1 <<EOF
hostname
$PARTED $DISK print
$PARTED $DISK mkpartfs primary ext2 0.017 1812371.050
$PARTED $DISK mkpartfs primary ext2 1812371.050 3624742.100
$PARTED $DISK mkpartfs primary ext2 3624742.100 5437113.150
$PARTED $DISK mkpartfs primary ext2 5437113.150 7249484.200
$PARTED $DISK mkpartfs primary ext2 7249484.200 9061855.233
$PARTED $DISK print
EOF

Also discovered while I was doing this that I'd only created a 2.1TB partition on disk040 as I forgot to enable the 64-bit LBA mode. Done and reinitialising volume.

> snmpget -v1 -c <communityname> -Pu -m all areca040 ARECA-SNMP-MIB::volProgress.0
ARECA-SNMP-MIB::volProgress.0 = INTEGER: 313
ie, 31% done so far....

Spent some of the week doing sysadmin work on the new cluster. Discovered that not all raid cards are configured equal thanks to a set of scripts using Net-SNMP. Although Areca are kind enough to supply the MIB Files for the Raid cards, they're badly written and contain underscores in the definitions. I already discovered a workaround last week but as I've just installed Nagios on the master node (together with the magic mod-ssl incantation to make parts of the site only accessible to named DN's) I discovered that the check_snmp plugin doesn't work with it.

One quick hack of the source file to add in

asprintf (&command_line, "%s -Pu -t %d -r %d -m %s -v %s %s %s:%s %s",

and it works as well as can be expected. Raised a sf.net ticket to try and get something better propogated upstream.

Now working on a Makefile and a pile of shell scripts to automagically generate a set of nagios configs to check each node before Paul integrates it all with MonAMI. Crib notes and more info available on the GridPP Nagios Page