eTech Daily

Installing MPICH 2 on PCLinuxOS 2007

Uncas Ripley — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:16:16 +0000

I needed to install MPICH on my Linux machine in order to run my P3PPLE code at home. Normally this is not a problem, because either LAM-MPI or MPICH is available through Synaptic package manager. That is how I installed it earlier when I used KUBUNTU. However, in PCLinuxOS 2007 neither of those packages is available. I thought that maybe some non-default repositories would allow me to install it, and I asked about this on PCLinuxOS support channel on IRC Freenode. I got not help there.

Since I’ve never installed MPICH from scratch I figured I’ll give it a try this time. I went on the MPICH2 project website and I downloaded mpich2.tar.gz package. I used Ark to extract the package in ~/work directory. Here’s a quick rundown or installation steps I took, and my notes for each steps. The purpose is post is to serve me as a reference if I ever need to do this again.

Installation

Choose an installation directory

I used the default installation directory: /usr/local/lib

Choose a build directory

I used /tmp/mpich2, because its temporary

Choose Configuration Options

I only used –enable-sharedlibs=gcc option.

Configure MPICH 2

You have to do this as ROOT

I had to download gcc-c++ package with Synaptic. During configuration I got an error message saying that c++ compiler was not installed.

Build MPICH2

Still as ROOT

I just followed Installation Guide instructions. This step took about 10 minutes to complete.

Install MPICH2 Commands

Still as root

This step was very quick. I Just followed Installation Guide.

After these 6 steps I basically installed MPICH2. It didn’t take more that 20 minutes all together. I had to create another file .mpd.conf in my home directory and set a secretword in it. My sectretword was mpich2-b3n.

Finally, I added the directory where P3PPLE executable is created to PATH variable. This was done as USER by typing following: PATH = $PATH:/home/Benjamin/work/P3PPLE/

DONE.

Working with Word 2007

Uncas Ripley — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 03:09:50 +0000

I am writing this post in Word 2007. I have just set up Word so that it will post to my blog automatically. This latest Microsoft Word is very interesting. They have done a lot of improvements that make the program more intuitive to use. However, I still find some things confusing, especially the difference between choosing a ‘style’ and a ‘theme’ for a page. They both seem to do the same thing to me. Also, I don’t think it would be very good for large reports with lots of tables and figures. Keeping track of references is another issue that I would like to learn about. On the positive side, its fun to work with and its new default font Calibri, is much better than Times New Roman. I’m posting a picture just to see how it will look.

Working with Microsoft Power Toys for Windows XP

Uncas Ripley — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 03:00:39 +0000

I discovered Microsoft Power Toys when I was working on my thesis. I was working with a lot of large data files and I wanted to be able to zip them easily. I installed GZip for Windows sine I was used to working with gzip under Linux. But I had a problem that in order to use gzip you need to open a DOS prompt in the folder you want to zip the files in.

One of the power toys on the above website, and there are 15 of them, is called “Open Command Window Here”. I installed it and it worked great. You just right click on any folder, and you now get an option to open the command window so that the working directory is that folder. I found it very useful over the last couple of years.

Another power toy I use regularly is called Virtual Desktop Manager. It mimics Linux’s multiple desktops, and its really good if you’re working with a lot of windows open at the same time.

There are also other power toys that let you extensively tweak XP configuration and do many other interesting things.

Review of ExplorerXP

Uncas Ripley — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:43:29 +0000

I was looking for a program that will allow me to create tabs when browsing my files, similar to the way I open tabs in Firefox. I found ExplorerXP to be perfect for this. It doesn’t actually alter your windows explorer, but rather its a separate program that, when you run it, appears like windows explorer and it lets you open tabs. By default the program will even show you the size of the folders on your disk. This is a pretty cool option that I think a lot of people find useful.

The program also has an interesting “group” feature. It allows you to group a collection of folders under a certain group name. You can then easily choose which group you want to work with at any time. The customizations are actually very useful and let you to improve the look and usability of the program.

Overall, this program completely met and exceeded my needs for a tabbed windows explorer application. I strongly recommend it.

Linux Clustering with OSCAR

Uncas Ripley — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:26:13 +0000

This past week I successfully set up my first OSCAR cluster. I took me 2 full days of work to have it working properly. It didn’t go as smoothly as I was hoping but in the end I was able to resolve all of the issues I encountered. I found the oscar IRC channel to be very helpful. A couple of guys there really helped me and guided me through some problems I was encountering.

The first issue I encountered was that when I would try to network boot my client node using PXE, I would get a error message PXE-32: TFTP open timeout! I didn’ know why this was happening, and it took me a lot of time to figure it out. I first made sure that tftp service was up and running on my master node by typing as a root

>chkconfig –list tftp

After doing this and making sure that tftp was up and running I went to IRC channel and asked for help. It turned out that the problem was that I didn’t disable firewall on the master node. Once I did that, network booting worked great.

Next issue was that the slave node could not network boot properly. The first thing I did to try to fix this was to use “Use Your Own Kernel (UYOK)” option in OSCAR wizard. This did make the boot up process move along further but my slave node still couldn’t boot. After getting advice from an IRC channel, I copied “modprobe.conf” to the folder on the master node which is used during network boot by slave node. I don’t remember the exact folder name at this time, but it was something like this “/opt/systemimager/etc/”. Doing this allowed me to complete the network boot of the slave node and finish its installation.

I did encounter some smaller problems once the slave node was installed, but I might write up the solution to that some other time.

Installing Windows XP Pro on Dell PowerEedge 2950 Server

Uncas Ripley — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 05:09:48 +0000

Yesterday at work we finally received our 2 brand new PE 2950 servers from Dell. We want to set up a mini, 2 node, Linux cluster with them and it is my job to do this. As I have never set up a cluster before, I took this on as a personal and a professional challenge.

I realized that by doing this I am actually learning a lot about Linux, networking, clustering and computers in general. So thats why I opened this blog to keep track of things I learn here and in the future.

First, here’s the description of what I’m working with. One machine will serve as a master node and the other as slave node. Master node has a 146 GB SAS drive (10K rmp), and the slave has a single 80 GB SATA-3G drive (7,2K rpm). Those are really the only differences between the two nodes. They both have a single dual core Intel Xenon 5150 2.66 GHz processor and 2GB or RAM @ 667 MHz. The machines were bought from Dell and they arrived in 7 business days as expected.

My ultimate goal is to set up a Linux cluster with the 2 machines, but I also wanted to have the ability to run Windows XP on both of them. Windows is useful to us at work as we have a lot of windows based applications only. So, my plan was to first install XP on both machines, and then install Linux on a separate partitions so that I can dual-boot each machine.

Its too late now to explain exactly what I did to install XP on both servers, but I will write more tomorrow.

Ok, after connecting the master node, I turned it on and put the XP installation CD into the CD-ROM. I would get the blue screen and I had to wait untill all of the drivers are loaded. But, then something unexpected happened. I received an error message saying that XP cannot be installed because no hard drive was detected. Of course I immediately tried to do this one more time to make sure its not a fluke. It wasn’t.

After a bit of googling I realized that XP does not have the drivers for the SAS 5/i integrated controller for my SATA HD. So I needed an XP driver for this. I first looked to at the drivers CD that came with the machines, but they only had drivers for windows 2000, and windows 2003 server edition. I didn’t really know where to get the drivers online so i used the win 2000 driver and gave it a try.

I read online that you have to put the new driver onto a floppy and press F6 right after XP starts the installation, so that way XP can read the driver from a floppy. Thats what i did. This seemed to work. XP was able to recognize the HD and I proceded to install it in a normal way.

At the end of the install process the machine normally reboots itself and boots directly off HD and installation is finalized. However, during the boot process my machine crashed and I got a blue screen asking me if I want to boot the windows in the safe mode. I tried but with same result.

I thought about trying the 2003 server edition drivers but then I thought of looking up the solution on Dell’s community forums. I left this post. I also asked some people for help on #windows IRC channel on freenode. I realized that I needed a XP driver for the SAS controller so I looked onto LSI’s web site, which is the company that makes these contnrollers. There, I found the following XP driver and I redid my installation using it.

That did the trick. Now I have a fully functioning win xp on a Dell PE 2950 server, which saved us a lot of money because we don’t really need the Windows server edition for anything we do.