During this phase, you will prepare the machine to be used as the server node in the OSCAR cluster.
If you have a machine you want to use that already has Linux installed, ensure that it meets the minimum requirements as listed in Section 1.3. If it does, you may skip ahead to Section 7.1.2.
It should be noted that OSCAR is only supported on the distributions
listed in Table 1
(page ). As such, use of
distributions other than those listed will likely require some porting
of OSCAR, as many of the scripts and software within OSCAR are
dependent on those distributions.
When installing Linux, do not worry about doing a ``custom'' install since OSCAR will install all the software on which it depends. The main Linux installation requirement is that some X windowing environment such as GNOME or KDE must be installed. Typically, a ``Workstation'' install with the ``Software Development Tools'' group added yields a sufficient installation for OSCAR to install successfully.
OSCAR has certain requirements for server disk space. Space will be needed to store the Linux RPMs and to store the images. The RPMs will be stored in /tftpboot/rpm. Approximately 2GB is required to store the RPMs. The images are stored in /var/lib/systemimager and will need approximately 2GB per image. Only one image is required, although you may want to create more in the future.
If you are installing a new server, it is suggested that you allow for 4GB in both the / (which contains /tftpboot) and /var filesystems when partitioning the disk on your server.
If you are using an existing server, you will need to verify that you have enough space on the disk partitions. Again 2GB of free space is recommended under each of / and /var.
You can check the amount of free space on your drive's partitions by issuing the command df -h in a terminal. The result for each file system is located below the Available column heading. If your root (/) partition has enough free space, enter the following command in a terminal:
# mkdir -p /tftpboot/rpm
If your root partition does not have enough free space, create the directories on a different partition that does have enough free space and create symbolic links to them from the root (/) directory. For example, if the partition containing /usr contains enough space, you could do so by using the following commands:
# mkdir -p /usr/tftpboot/rpm # ln -s /usr/tftpboot /tftpboot
The same procedure should be repeated for the /var/lib/systemimager subdirectory.
If you are reading this, you probably already have a copy of an OSCAR
distribtuion package. If not, go to
http://oscar.sourceforge.net/ and download the latest OSCAR
Regular or Extra Crispy distribution package (see
Section 2, page ).
Place the OSCAR distribution package to a directory such as root's home directory on the server node. Although there is no required installation directory (note that you may not use the directory /usr/local/oscar or /opt/oscar - they are both reserved for future use), the rest of these instructions will assume that you downloaded the OSCAR distribution package to root's home directory.
Do not unpack the tarball on a Windows-based machine and copy the directories over to the server, as this will convert all the scripts to ``DOS'' format and will render them useless under Linux.
Open a command terminal and issue the following commands to unpack the OSCAR distribution package:
# cd # tar zxf <filename>
Where filename
is either
oscar-2.0b1.tar.gz (regular distribution) or
oscar-including-srpms-2.0b1.tar.gz (extra crispy
distribution).
Download and install any optional third party packages and unpack them into the OSCAR tree.
For example, if you want OSCAR to install the Ganglia package, download the Ganglia OSCAR tarball from the main OSCAR SourceForge site. Expand it into the packages/ directory in the OSCAR tree (assuming that ganglia-oscar-2.0b1.tar.gz is in root's home directory):
# cd /oscar-2.0b1/packages
# tar zxf /ganglia-oscar-2.0b1.tar.gz
This will make the directory oscar-2.0b1/packages/ganglia with all the files necessary to install Ganglia in an OSCAR cluster. This step must be performed before the main OSCAR installation.
Each third-party OSCAR package likely comes with its own documentation. For example, the OSCAR Ganglia package comes with a README file and doc/ganglia-user.pdf which should both be read before attempting to install or use Ganglia.
Assuming you want your server to be connected to both an public network and the private cluster subnet, you will need to have two ethernet adapters installed in the server. It is preferred that you do this because exposing your cluster may be a security risk, and certain software used in OSCAR (such as DHCP) may conflict with your external network.
Once both adapters have been physically installed in the server node, you need to configure them.3 Any network configurator is sufficient; popular applications include neat, netcfg, or a text editor.
The following major requirements need to be satisfied:
Now reboot the server node to ensure that all the changes are propagated to the appropriate configuration files. To confirm that all ethernet adapters are in the ``up'' state, once the machine has rebooted, open another terminal window and enter the following command:
# ifconfig -a
You should see UP as the first word on the third line of output for each adapter. If not, there is a problem that you need to resolve before continuing. Typically, the problem is that the wrong module is specified for the given device. Try using the network configuration utility again to resolve the problem.
In this step, you need to copy the RPMs included with your Linux distribution into the /tftpboot/rpm directory. When each CD is inserted, Linux should automatically make the contents of the CD be available in the /mnt/cdrom directory (you may need to execute a command such as ``mount /mnt/cdrom'' if the CD does not mount automatically).
For each CD, locate the directory that contains the RPMs. In RedHat 7.x, the RPMs are located in the RedHat/RPMS directory (i.e., /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS). Copy the RPMS into the /tftpboot/rpm directory with a command such as:
# cp /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/*.rpm /tftpboot/rpm
Be sure to repeat the above process for all CDs. After using each CD you will have to unmount it from the local file system and eject it by issuing these commands:
# cd # eject cdrom
Obtain all the relevant RPM updates for your distribution - security patches, bug fixes, etc. Most distributions (including RedHat) include a tool to automate this process (e.g., up2date) that will automatically download and install all relevant updated RPMs.
Ensure that these updated RPMs are also copied to /tftpboot/rpm. It does not matter if two different versions of the same RPM end up in /tftpboot/rpm (e.g., foo-1.2.3-1.i386.rpm from the installation CD and foo-1.2.4-1.i386.rpm from the updates) - OSCAR will automatically use the latest version when it selects RPMs to install.
root 2002-11-08