ndt-users list created

[Chris Hawkinson <>]

Hi All,

I looked for a How-to to install the pS-Performance toolkit image to a 
hard drive, but none were forthcoming... so... here's what I did, which, 
hopefully, will be useful to the community as well;

Hardware: SGI/Rackable Systems dual Xeon 1U server. 2x146G SAS HDs. 4GB 
RAM. 2x1GEnet. 1x10GEnet (Intel). Using an external USB CD drive.

Goal: Setup a RAID 1 mirrored performance test point based on the 
pS-Performance Toolkit v3.1.3 distribution.

Steps I followed to get this up and running...

1) Booted the system with the pS-Performance Toolkit v3.1.3 CD

2) Logged in as knoppix and then 'sudo -i'

3) Run 'fdisk /dev/sda' and configured 2 partitions ...
   a) primary part #1 - 142GB primary partition with a type of Linux (0x83)
   b) primary part #2 - 4GB primary partition 2 with a type of Linux 
Swap (0x82)

*** if you are not setting up an MD RAID 1, skip to step 6, below

4) Run 'fdisk /dev/sdb' and setup the exact same partition map on the 
2nd drive

5) Setup an md raid 1 mirror...
a) 'modprobe raid1'
b) 'mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1'
c) wait for the mirror to finish initializing (it'll print a message to 
the console when finished, or 'cat /proc/mdstat')

6) Run 'knoppix-installer'
  i) Configure options
   a) select a type of 'Debian'
   b) selected /dev/md0 as the installation partition (if you are using 
a single disk, choose /dev/sda1 instead)
   c) selected ext3 as the file system type
   d) Entered knoppix as the "whole name", and also as the "user name"
   e) entered suitable passwords for knoppix and administrator
   f) entered a hostname for my system
   g) selected MBR as the boot-loader option
  ii) Select Start Installation and let it finish

7) I did see several setup warnings related to init.d which didn't seem 
to have an effect on the installation

8) Answered NO when asked to insert a floppy, which isn't required for 
this type of install

9) Setup completed and put me back to the root prompt.

10) For my RAID configuration, I also installed Grub to the 2nd HD, as 
follows...
  i) Run 'grub'
        grub> device (hd0) /dev/sdb
        grub> root (hd0,0)
        grub> setup (hd0)
        grub> quit

11) Removed the CD, and rebooted the system.

12) On 1st reboot, fsck will do a filesystem check on the boot hard 
drive (/dev/md0 in my case)

13) Logged in as root (using the password I set for the administrator 
account)

14) Ran 'visudo' and uncommented the knoppix user line. Saved the file.

15) Setup a RAID 1 for SWAP ...
a) 'mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2'
b) wait for the mirror to finish initializing (it'll print a message to 
the console when finished, or 'cat /proc/mdstat')

16) Configure swap with 'mkswap /dev/md1'

17) Enable swap with 'swapon /dev/md1'

18) Edit /etc/fstab and add the line '/dev/md1  none  swap  sw  0  0'

19) If using RAID, remove the last 4 lines in fstab which are 
automatically added by the installer (these all have comments line '# 
ADDED BY KNOPPIX')

20) If using RAID, edit /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf and change the DEVICE line 
to read 'DEVICE /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2'

21) If using RAID, edit /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig, search for

21) REBOOT. After reboot use 'swapon -s' to verify the RAID 1 swap 
partition is being used.

22) Ran 'sudo np-toolkit-configure.py' and selected /dev/md0 as the 
Storage device ... did rest of the Toolkit setup as usual.

... Seems to works for me! ...

Chris

Chris Hawkinson
Network Performance Engineer
CENIC