Huli

Huli is the Tribler backup server! This wiki page will present some notes that came up during the installation. This may help when either something with this server goes wrong, or when a clean installation is required.

Hardware

The server has a 16 bay hot-swappable 24TB (14 2TB HD) hardware-RAID array, accessable from the front. The hardware-RAID controller is an Areca ARC-1261 16 port controller. Furthermore there are two 500GB harddisks connected to the integrated fake-RAID controller on the Intel S5000PSL motherboard. These are used as RAID1 Linux software-RAID array containing the system.

Debian

Booting

After the installation the order of the harddisks as seen by the kernel was changed. The hardware-RAID array, which was sdc on installation, became sda. For booting from the Linux software-RAID reliably, GRUB2 was installed after the initial installation was complete. GRUB2 understands the Linux software-RAID and will find the correct partitions to boot from even if a disk fails. To install GRUB2 on all MBRs of the disks that make up the software-RAID, use grub-install /dev/md0.

Booting update

From: Gertjan

To: Paulo

Subject: Re: Huli not booting

Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 15:54:41 +0200



To leave a record for posterity, here is a description of the problem and the

solution:



For some reason (see below for an hypothesis), the BIOS of the embedded

RAID controler (host-RAID) integrated on the mainboard decided that it was

no longer suitable as a boot device. This caused the BIOS to try to boot from

the Areca hardware-RAID controller, which of course only contained the data

partition, and which subsequently failed to boot. In the "boot options" tab

of the BIOS, the second boot device (after the DVD) was shown as something

like "(Bus 7/Lun 0/Dev 0) RAID Volum", which corresponds to the Areca

RAID controler.



The solution is to disable the RAID mode of the on-board RAID controller (and

switch on AHCI mode) in the "advanced options" tab, under "ATA options" (?),

such that the system disks are available as separate hard-disks. After this

switch, the "boot options" tab in the BIOS shows a "hard disk order" option

again, which can be used to determine the order in which the hard disks are

tried for booting. This of course should list the first of the system disks

first and the Areca last. After this has been set correctly, the system boots

normally again.



My guess is that a small area at the end of the system disks was overwritten,

which caused the on-board RAID controller to determine that the disks were

not a valid RAID device. Note that the disks were still available in Linux

as normal, and both disks were also shown during boot as part of the

embedded RAID setup, obfuscating the problem. In any case, this problem can

most likely also affect masai. With the above information, it should be

trivial to fix.

Network settings

E-mail

The e-mail setup was done as described on the kayapo page.

NTP

To ensure the correct time on huli, openntpd has been installed. This is by default configured to use the servers pointed to by the debian pool, which has been left untouched.

Home dirs

In case you are missing something: home dirs are stored at: huli:/srv/masai/exports/homes