[ale] NanoPC

Thu Mar 6 12:46:57 EST 2014

Small setup here. HPC stack is only 10 nodes with IB and Tesla cards. There
are additional systems for specialty database projects and a VMware stack
I'm slowly converting to Ovirt.

All total we have 2 full 42U racks with one rack of high density gear and
the other rack of lower density storage gear. Main NAS is about 80TB. All
running CentOS 5 or 6 or Fedora 19 (or esx with one windows server for the
manager - blech!)

And I am the only admin. Plus I have the student lab room with an amorphous
hodgepodge of crap running win7 or Linux (Ubuntu or Fedora) and lousy
bandwidth back to the NAS for /home mounts.

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu> wrote:

> Ah, I didn't realize you were at Emory.
> No, I'm at UA (University of Alabama main campus) in Tuscaloosa.  I'm the
> primary Systems Engineer for Linux Systems, and the backup guy for
> virtualization.  Luckily, the HPC stuff gets managed by someone else for
> the most part.
> How big of a deployment do you have?
> We've got 250+ datacenter Linux systems, and another big chunk for
> HPC/research.
> Most of the datacenter stuff runs SLES, with a handful of other distros
> thrown in the mix because of vendor requirements.
>
> --
> Allen Beddingfield
> Systems Engineer
> The University of Alabama
> ________________________________
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [ale-bounces at ale.org] on behalf of Jim Kinney [
> jim.kinney at gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 11:15 AM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] NanoPC
>
> Aren't large college campus IT issues fun?!?!?
>
>
> I forgot you were at UaB (I think) and that kind of environment (like mine
> at Emory) provides rather, um, unique problems.
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:02 PM, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu<mailto:
> allen at ua.edu>> wrote:
> The problem we have is that we end up acting as more a central hosting
> provider at times...  we have so many disjointed areas around campus doing
> things on their own...they go and have someone develop a site for them,
> THEN put in the request for us to host it.  We don't have a central web
> development team, although we have pockets of web developers who know what
> they are doing, and for the most part, they run critical sites.  Right now,
> we have 500+ WordPress sites, and one of our Security employees spends a
> good portion of his time trying to get people to patch their WordPress
> before it gets hacked, etc...
> Yay.
> Allen B.
>
> --
> Allen Beddingfield
> Systems Engineer
> The University of Alabama
> ________________________________
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org<mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org> [ale-bounces at ale.org
> <mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org>] on behalf of Jim Kinney [
> jim.kinney at gmail.com<mailto:jim.kinney at gmail.com>]
> Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 10:37 AM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] NanoPC
>
> On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu<mailto:
> allen at ua.edu><mailto:allen at ua.edu<mailto:allen at ua.edu>>> wrote:
> I'm constantly arguing with boneheaded web developers who go and do their
> development on the latest bleeding-edge release of Ubuntu, Fedora, or
> OpenSUSE on a VM on their workstations, then expect me to upgrade the PHP
> on our SLES servers to that version on their test VM.
> At this point, I have to point out that we provide test/dev space on an
> identical server to production for a reason...and then they stomp and rant
> and rave, and I have to escalate to management and let them tell them "not
> just no, but hell no" on pulling in unsupported PHP packages or setting
> them up a special Debuntu VM for their site.
> Bleeding edge releases + web developers = a deadly combination and a huge
> security problem.
> Allen B.
>
> That's always an issue. I changed our HPC stack from CentOS to Fedora to
> avoid a mess of broken lib issues. At least these don't see public traffic.
> PHP is scary enough without running the latest developer versions on a
> public site.
>
> I call those developers "lazy and soon to be unemployed". Provide them a
> mirror environment of the production realm to develop in and if they can't
> make it work, they can explain whey the design needs to change or they can
> work somewhere else.
>
> --
> --
> James P. Kinney III
>
> Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
> at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
> It won't fatten the dog.
> - Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
>
> http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org<mailto:Ale at ale.org>
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
>
> --
> --
> James P. Kinney III
>
> Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
> at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
> It won't fatten the dog.
> - Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
>
> http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>

-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain

*http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
<http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/>*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20140306/bdf0a7c5/attachment-0001.html>