Backing Up 389 LDAP

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 […]

Managing Research Computing Clusters with Ansible

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 […]

“interactive” script for SLURM

I recently rolled out a new distributed model for our research computing cluster at work. We’re using GlusterFS for networked home directories and SLURM for job/resource scheduling. GlusterFS allows us to scale storage with minimal downtime or service disruption, and SLURM allows us to treat compute nodes as generic resources for running users’ jobs (ie, […]

Sysadmin is happy when users use SLURM

I recently rolled out a new distributed model for our research computing cluster at work. We’re using GlusterFS for networked home directories and SLURM for job/resource scheduling. GlusterFS allows us to scale storage with minimal downtime or service disruption, and SLURM allows us to treat compute nodes as generic resources for running users’ jobs (ie, […]

Compile RStudio on CentOS 6

We wanted to use RStudio (an advanced IDE for R) on one of our high-memory machines at work. As our research-computing environment is a cluster of sorts (network-attached storage, with several compute nodes), I have to take extra care to install things a bit more “sustainably”; apps are installed in a non-standard prefix globally available […]