Sysadmin sessions and hands-on

Storage & filesystem topics

  • Front-end lectures covering the following topics: STORAGE, RAID, LVM, Filesystems, linux FS Hierarchy, configuration examples.

  • Linux command line tools concerning storage configuration, filesystems usage, status and statistics:

    mount, df, /proc/mounts, /etc/fstab, iostat, lsof, fuser, netstat

  • overview of raid configuration tools and hard disk partitioning:

    (cli64, arecacli, aaraid)
(mdadm, lvm (pv*, vg*, lv*))
(fdisk, sfdisk, parted)
(mkfs.*)

  • physical installation of a spare hard drive, demonstrating hot-plug/hot-swap capabilities of the hardware/software without downtime

  • raid configuration using bios, graphical and command line interfaces:

    NVIDIA RAID utility (fake RAID)
cli64 (ARECA RAID controller command line)

  • filesystems handling tools, creation and tuning:

    (mkfs.*, fsck.*, dumpe2fs, tune2fs, mount, chown/chmod)

  • basic benchmarking tools and techniques:

    (dd, iostat, iozone, bonnie++)

  • filesystem permissions, onwerships and access policies:

    (chown, chmod, stat, ls)
  • filesystem quotas::

    (quota)

Installation procedures

  • bios setup, how to enable/disable bios features and settings

  • graphical and command line utilities for the setup of the Linux O.S.:

    (ifconfig, route, ip)
(system-config-*)

  • overview of the linux services and the boot-up process:

    (service, chkconfig, /etc/init.d/*, /etc/rc<RUNLEVEL>.d)

  • user and system accounts creation/deletion:

    (useradd, groupadd, id, finger, ..., /etc/{passwd,group,shadow})

  • in-band and out-of-band management:

    (console, ssh, IPMI)
  • remote management interfaces and commands, configuration of IPMI interface of a data-server using local and remote interfaces::

    (ipmitool, ipmiping, ...)

  • a closer look inside the server: live demonstration about the hardware technologies and components available on the server, including a demonstration about hardware redundancy, fault tolerance and parts replacement

  • Linux advanced command line tools for diagnostic, statistic collection, management:

    (ethtool, mii-tool, iostat, /proc/*, nmap, tcpdump, tshark)

Software management

  • installation of packages from repositories:

    (yum, rpm)
  • setup of local package repositories::

    (createrepo, mount, exportfs)

    http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/CreateLocalMirror

  • setup epel repositories:

    > rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

  • installation, configuration and tuning of packages compiling from sources, describing “configure/make/make install” procedure:

    (configure, make, make install)

  • handling the shell environment from the sysadmin point of view: environment variables, shell and environment modules tools:

    ($LD_LIBRARY_PATH, $PATH, ldconfig, modules)
  • overview of HPC infrastructures and installation procedures, setup of distributed filesystems (NFS) and advanced services::

    (mount, exportfs, rpc.*)

  • remote access using ssh keys, passwordless environment, distributed and parallel shells:

    (ssh, ssh-keygen, ssh-keyscan, ssh-copy-id, ssh-add, ssh-agent)

  • security: physical access, redundancy, fault tolerance, firewall, access control, user limits, system logs analysis:

    (iptables, ulimit, pam (security, limits), /var/log/*, dmesg)

  • queue system and process scheduling from the sysadmin perspective:

    (torque, maui)
  • remote management: remote commands and remote console for out-of-band access::

    (ipmitool, ipmiconsole)

  • open discussion concerning several topics proposed by the students, including HPC, networking, storage technologies, usage rules and access policies, admin strategies, hardware/software configuration