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This page was rewritten by Bill Curry in October '07.

What's here:
  1. Policy
  2. Backups
  3. Configuration

Policy

When it comes to your home machine, you are on your own. Office machines should be largely your responsibility as well. Hopefully we will completely move to Macs for desktops soon.

Backups

/homes on koko is mirrored nightly. Personal devices are mirrored once per week. There is a backup script at ~bill/mirror_personal.py that you can adapt to your needs for mirroring on your desktop machine. You can run this nightly using the crontab command and adding a line something like:
21 4 * * * python /homes/sep/yourhome/mirror_personal.py >/dev/null
Which runs the script at 04:21 every morning.

Configuration

Here is what is done to configure a newly-installed linux machine to work in the SEP environment
  1. Copy automounter configuration files from an existing machine (like koko). These files are auto.master, auto.netbase, and auto.netsub, and they need to go in /etc. They are responsible for the /net/machinename/directory paths working on all machines.
  2. Make symbolic links (ln -s) from /homes to /net/koko/homes and /usr/local to /net/koko/linux_local. This ensures that the machines sees your home directory on koko as well as common binaries on koko
  3. Change to root, and edit the crontab (crontab -e) to inlcude:
    6,36 * * * * /usr/local/share/admin/common/slave_files.py external >/dev/null 2>&1
    This example is for a desktop machine that is only on the internet and not our intranet in the computer room. If the machine is only on the intranet "internal" should replace "external" above. If it is on both networks (unlikely), "both" should replace "external".
    This runs a script that copies over the /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/shadow, /etc/hosts, /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny. This is for login information and what machines are allowed to connect to it.
  4. Type "chkconfig --list" to see what services are running. Make sure that iptables, arptables_jf, and sendmail are turned off. Make sure that nfs and automount are turned on.
  5. If this is a computing machine, edit /etc/inittab to set the runlevel to 3 so that X isn't run at startup.
  6. Again, if this is a computing machine, edit /etc/exports to make sure that the scratch drives will be visible from other machines via nfs. Use an existing machine (like koko) as an example.
  7. Gluster needs to be set up so that the network disk space is visible. I do not know how to do this.

    © 2007 , Stanford Exploration Project
    Department of Geophysics
    Stanford University

    Modified: 10/25/07, 15:01:15 PDT , by bill
    Page Maintainer: bill `AT' sep.stanford.edu