A few weeks ago, in a moment of weakness, I installed xfce4 and xfce4-goodies. I was having problems with GNOME 3.8 on my hipster Samsung Series 9 laptop, and decided maybe XFCE (4.10.1 as of this writing) was the answer. Nope. GTFO. I went back to GNOME and forgot the affair ever happened… until now, […]
The other day a drive died in a hardware RAID5 array on one of my GlusterFS replica servers. I had a spare drive on hand, but I wasn’t sure what the process was for replacing it, and just how much down time my cluster would incur. To my surprise, I took the replica down and […]
Notes from the GlusterFS 3.3.1 -> 3.4.0 upgrade on my storage / compute cluster at ILRI, Kenya. I referenced Vijay Bellur’s blog post about upgrading to 3.4, then added my own bits using Ansible for my infrastructure (I gave an overview of my Ansible setup here). Our cluster is comprised of: Three “storage” nodes (gluster […]
We use 389 LDAP + sssd to handle logins on our research computing cluster at ILRI; users and groups live in 389 and the computing and storage nodes authenticate and do uid/gid lookups using sssd. It’s a really nice setup and Red Hat has done a great job making sure the whole stack works well […]
Our research computing cluster at work is slowly gathering more users, more storage, more applications, more physical machines etc. Managing everything consistently and predictably was beginning to get complicated (or maybe I’m just getting old?). There’s lots of buzz in DevOps circles about tools for managing this kind of scenario; Chef, Salt, Puppet and Ansible […]