In this article Barry Mavin explains step by step how to setup a Linux HA (High Availability) cluster for the running of Recital applications on Redhat/Centos 5.3 although the general configuration should work for other linux versions with a few minor changes.
Occasionally as a Linux administrator you will be in the situation where working on a remote server and you are left with no option but to force a reboot the system. This may be for a number of reasons, but where I have found it most frequent is when working on Linux clusters in a remote location.
When the "reboot" or "shutdown" commands are executed daemons are gracefully stopped and storage volumes unmounted.
This is usually accomplished via scripts in the /etc/init.d directory which will wait for each daemon to shut down gracefully before proceeding on to the next one. This is where a situation can develop where your Linux server fails to shutdown cleanly leaving you unable to administer the system until it is inspected locally. This is obviously not ideal so the answer is to force a reboot on the system where you can guarantee that the system will power cycle and come back up. The method will not unmount file systems nor sync delayed disk writes, so use this at your own discretion.
To force the kernel to reboot the system we will be making use of the magic SysRq key.
The magic_SysRq_key provides a means to send low level instructions directly to the kernel via the /proc virtual file system.
To enable the use of the magic SysRq option type the following at the command prompt:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
Then to reboot the machine simply enter the following:
echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
Voilà! Your system will instantly reboot.
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Many motherboards nowadays have integrated gigabit ethernet that use the Realtek NIC chipset.
The Realtek r8168B network card does not work out of the box in Redhat/Centos 5.3: instead of loading the r8168 driver, modprobe loads the r8169 driver, which is broken as can be seen with ifconfig which shows large amounts of dropped packets. A solution is to download the r8168 driver from the Realtek website and install it using the following steps:
Check whether the built-in driver, r8169.ko (or r8169.o for kernel 2.4.x), is installed.
# lsmod | grep r8169
If it is installed remove it.
# rmmod r8169
Download the R8168B linux driver from here into /root.
Unpack the tarball :
# cd /root
# tar vjxf r8168-8.012.00.tar.bz2
Change to the directory:
# cd r8168-8.012.00
If you are running the target kernel, then you should be able to do :
# make clean modules
# make install
# depmod -a
# insmod ./src/r8168.ko (or r8168.o in linux kernel 2.4.x)
make sure modprobe knows not to use r8169, and that depmod doesn’t find the r8169 module.
# echo "blacklist r8169" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
# mv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/r8169.ko \ /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/r8169.ko.bak
You can check whether the driver is loaded by using the following commands.
# lsmod | grep r8168
# ifconfig -a
If there is a device name, ethX, shown on the monitor, the linux driver is loaded. Then, you can use the following command to activate it.
# ifconfig ethX up
After this you should not see any more dropped packets reported.
Usually, you do not need to setup an email server under Linux. Most GUI email clients support Gmail POP3 and IMAP configurations. But, how do you send mail via the standard /usr/bin/mail user agents in a shell script? Programs such as sendmail / postfix / exim can be configured as a gmail smarthost but they are largely overkill for this use. The ssmtp program is a neat utility that does just that for you via gmail.
APPEND FROM <table-name>Before when appending into a shared Recital table each new row was locked along with the table header, then unlocked after it was inserted. This operation has now been enhanced to lock the table once, complete inserting all the rows from the table and then unlock the table. The performance of this operation has been increased by using this method. All the database and table constraints are still enforced.
One of the attractive features of Linux is the impressive 3D desktop that even works on most older hardware.
You can enabled the 3D Desktop on CentOS5 by installing the compiz package:
yum install compiz
After you have done this, go to the top panel and click System, then select Preferences > and click 'Desktop Effects.
You will get a new dialog. To test and see if your hardware supports the 3D Desktop, press the button Enable Desktop Effects. If everything works fine, you can select Keep Settings.
Then test your 3D Desktop by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Left and Ctrl-Alt-Right, or drag a window around or even out of the screen to the left or right. If you maximize a window, you will see another cool effect. If you move the mouse to the upper-right corner of the screen you see all your opened applications.Way cool!
In this article Barry Mavin explains step by step how to setup a Linux HA (High Availability) cluster for the running of Recital applications on Redhat/Centos 5.3 although the general configuration should work for other linux versions with a few minor changes.
If you have 4 GB or more RAM use the Linux kernel compiled for PAE capable machines. Your machine may not show up total 4GB ram. All you have to do is install PAE kernel package.
This package includes a version of the Linux kernel with support for up to 64GB of high memory. It requires a CPU with Physical Address Extensions (PAE).
The non-PAE kernel can only address up to 4GB of memory. Install the kernel-PAE package if your machine has more than 4GB of memory (>=4GB).
# yum install kernel-PAE
If you want to know how much memory centos is using type this in a terminal:
# cat /proc/meminfo