perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

["D'Angelo, Cas" <>]

Hi all,

A few tips for NVME only perfSONAR (ie your server only has NVME drives).  This is my experience YMMV. 

My HPC admins worked with their vendor to configure a pS node.  Twin Mellanox 100G cards + twin 1.5TB NVME drives.

I could not get the perfSONAR toolkit install USB to install via UEFI.  Legacy boot does not support NVME drives.  3 options:

1) Install boot onto a USB or another spare drive

2) Install pS on top of RHEL7 UEFI

3) Install pS on top of CentOS UEFI

I did not like option 1.  My HPC admins could not make option 3 work.  So I was handed a RHEL7 UEFI box and began my journey to install the perfsonar-toolkit bundle.

RHEL7 + EPEL is missing some key packages right now.  I ended up installing the perfsonar-toolkit by mounting my install USB stick and setting it up as a repo by adding:

/etc/yum.repos.d/media.repo

with the contents:

[installperfsonar]

name=perfSONAR install

metadata_expire=-1

gpgcheck=0

cost=500

enabled=1

baseurl=file:///mnt/disc

mkdir -p /mnt/disc

mount /dev/sdx /mnt/disc

Then running:

yum install perfsonar-toolkit

After success:

umount /mnt/disc

rm /etc/yum.repos.d/media.repo

python3 yum upgrade errors:

I also found that yum upgrade is confused when it comes to python3 right now.  My workaround was to decrease the cost of the epel repo by adding cost=900 to every stanza in epel.repo. 

I also added a CentOS repo at a higher cost = 1200 (default cost=1000) for the missing packages in RHEL7:

/etc/yum.repos.d/centos.repo

with the contents:

[centos]

name=CentOS-7

baseurl=http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/centos/7/os/x86_64

enabled=1

gpgcheck=1

gpgkey=http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/centos/7/os/x86_64/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7

cost=1200

Replace gtlib with your favorite CentOS mirror path.

This is working for now, but I am not planning to use it long term.  The server admins are going to install a pair of SATA SSDs. 

It is possible that by adding the centos.repo you could avoid using the media.repo.  Since I did not try this, I leave it as an exercise for the reader.

I also tried mounting an ISO (instead of the install USB drive), but could not find the packages even after mounting nested images.  I'm sure this is possible, but I gave up and used the USB.

A happy perfSONAR Friday to all.

Cas D'Angelo

AVP & Chief Operating Officer OIT

Georgia Tech

 

p: 404-894-1356

w: it.gatech.edu

 

 

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