• OSCAR 5.1
• 2 x PS3 machines or more
• USB key
• OtherOS Installer
• HDMI-DVI connector
• YellowDogLinux(YDL)5.0 (PPC) DVD
• USB Keyboard and USB mouse
• Network

• Download the OtherOS installer specially built for OSCAR
• Save it to the USB key (FAT format) and then hook it up to the PS3
• Power on PS3 on the game mode
  • Settings Menu → System Settings → A partition setting for hard disk: custom
    • 60GB = 10GB(Game) + 50GB(Linux)
  • Settings Menu → System Settings → Install Other OS
    • Click on OK to start the installation
  • Settings → System Settings → Default System and select “Other OS”

• Insert YDL5.0 DVD
• Restart PS3 to boot with Other OS
• Type in “install” at the kboot prompt
• Do the YDL5.0 installation

• Once YDL5.0 is fully installed and up, download OSCAR 5.1
• Follow the ordinary OSCAR installation instruction
  • After oscarimage is created at the oscar installation Step 4, there is one thing to modify the image manually. Just remove the systemconfig.conf file at the oscarimage built
  • At the OSCAR installation step 6. “Setup Networking…”, prepare PS3 client nodes to boot up with OtherOS like we did it on the head node PS3 at the above Step 1.

        chroot /var/lib/systemimager/images/oscarimage
        cd /etc/systemconfig
        mv systemconfig.conf systemconfig.conf.bak
       

• Finish up the OSCAR installation

For the updated instruction, please refer to the wiki page that I wrote on the OSCAR web site.

        mkisofs -T -r -o /tmp/mycd.iso  /data
        cdrecord -v -eject -fs=4M speed=8 dev=0,0,0 /tmp/mycd.iso

Run “cdrecord -scanbus” to search for the CD burner on your machine.

        mkisofs -T -r /data | cdrecord -v -eject -fs=4M speed=8 dev=0,0,0 -

If you prefer to use “tar” to backup your data to CD-R, here is another trick.

        tar -czf - /data | cdrecord -v -eject -fs=4M speed=8 dev=0,0,0 -

This won't be mountable as a normal CD, and you won't be able to put it in a Windows system, but it works fine on Linux.

• Install MySQL. If necessary, install mysql-server.
• Start MySQL (/etc/init.d/mysqld start)
• Setup root password

        shell> mysql -u root
        mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('newpwd‘);
        mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'host_name‘ = PASSWORD(’newpwd‘);
      

• Create a normal user

        mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'monty'@'localhost'
        ->     IDENTIFIED BY 'some_pass'
       

• Don't forget to flush privileges

        mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
      

I would like to share my simple scripts that I found useful while working for the Open Systems Lab(OSL) as a System Administrator

Sometimes my system is in trouble with the high loadaverage of the web server because of the attack of some malicious IPs.
I have tried to look for a command to get the IPs which make this kind of trouble by looking into its pid.

      lsof -nP -w -T -i tcp | grep httpd | grep <PROCESS_ID_TO_CHECK>

Sometimes I want to find the diffs between my local file and remote file or between remote files. Here is a simple trick.

      diff <LOCAL_FILE <(ssh remote_host_1 cat REMOTE_FILE)
      diff <(ssh remote_host_1 cat REMOTE_FILE_1)  <(ssh remote_host_2 cat REMOTE_FILE_2)

(Note, where remote_host_1 and remote_host_2 should be setup with your ssh-key stuff and you should not need to put your password or passphrase. Unfortunately, this works only on bash)

dump and restore are a sysadmin's friend. They really make it easy for sysadmin to handle the backup of a system. There may be some applications to replace the command dump and restore but I would like to be stuck with them untli I find something better than them.
Do you know that we can simply dump the whole partition and restore it on the remote machine? So, we can migrate the whole system with a following simple script using dump and restore

      ssh remote_host(_IP) -n dump 0cf - / | restore xf -

I found this tip when Bruce, the CS sysadmins at IU, helped to migrate one of the very important servers of the OSL. I would like to give special thanks to Bruce.

Note

• The target machine where you want to migrate a system should be clean(or empty) to take the whole system of the remote machine assuming it has enough space to restore the dump file.
• Reboot your target machine to go to a single-user mode. (e.g., I usually do with my linux installation CD)
• Run the above script at the target machine.
• Of course, the ssh-key stuff should be setup without having to put your password or passphrase.

mount -o loop -t iso9660 file.iso /mnt/test