The Linux Help and Tutorial Thread

[retro77]

Thanks D_A. I'm going to do that on my Beast.

[bearcatrp]

I just put Ubuntu 10.4 (lucid) on my westmere box. Running fine except ubuntu is throttling my cpu's. Went into the bios to lock the freq's but it's still throttling. I remember someone complaining on WCG about this but can't find it. Is there a command to keep crunching at max speed?
Another problem I have is lm-sensors. Anyone using a super micro board running ubuntu? Seems when I ran sensors-detect, none were found except the hard drives. There has to be sensors on the board, isn't there?

[retro77]

In the BOINC client itself there is an option to use the CPU while the computer is in use.

[D_A]

Yes there will be sensors on the board but that doesn't mean their registers are in standard places. Sometimes manufacturer's do some "funny" things, just because it suits them and sometimes the Linux drivers just can't read them for some reason. You might need some additional library to get them to work.
Try this:
Open the Synaptic package manager, then open Settings > Preferences
Check the box next to "Consider recommended packages as dependencies" and click apply
Now click Edit > Fix broken packages and follow it through.
then run sudo sensor-detect and see what it gives you.
I don't know if it will help but it's worth a try.
As for the throttling, that really should be in the BIOS.
Right click on the tool bar (top of the screen) and click "Add to panel" then scroll down to "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor".
If it installs without a complaining then frequency scaling is still enabled in the BIOS somewhere. I'm not sure, but you might be able to use it to hold the CPU frequency at 100%. Maybe.

[PoppaGeek]

Do not use the System Monitor. It will show show your CPUs at all sorts of percentage of use. The System Monitor runs at a higher priority than Boinc WUs. Open a Terminal and type top. It shows more info anyway just not as pretty.

[bearcatrp]

I went into the bios and locked down the CPU so it's max only. Better than configuring each core. I will try what D A suggested and report back later. If I can't monitor my temps, will have to go back to windows7, which bites. Ubuntu is know to perform better.

[bearcatrp]

Anyone ever heard of ipmi-sensors? Am trying to find this info. When I run sensors-detect, I get this warning about missing this.

[D_A]

I'm not familiar with it but you could search for it in the Synaptic package manager ( or sudo apt-get install ipmi-sensors and see what happens)

[bearcatrp]

Seems to be something new the mobo makers are implementing. Seems to be a royal PITA to configure. I'll hold off and see how crunching goes on Ubuntu compared to win7.

[D_A]

The other option is to download the source for the sensor modules and compile it yourself, which isn't as scary as it sounds but can be fiddly if you're not familiar with it.

Ok, searching through synaptic I found a package called freeipmi-tools which includes ipmi-sensors. Try installing that and see how you go.

[bearcatrp]

Well, install the free ipmi files. When I give it the command, says cannot connect to server. Tried -d local but still doesn't work. Will have to keep looking.

[bearcatrp]

Got it working. So far, it's command line base using terminal. For those interested, here is a link to the project:
http://www.gnu.org/software/freeipmi/documentation.html
It does read CPU, memory, fans, etc.. Still looking for an gui applet. So far, it's reading everything on my SM board.

[bearcatrp]

Looked most of the day with no luck. Appears SM has an option to install a card for monitoring remote systems. Also, Super doctor II appears to run in Linux but not sure if it can run as a stand alone without buying the card. I emailed SM about this so soon as I find out, will post solution. Ipmi can run in command line. Sucks to type this in terminal every time you want to see your temps though.

[retro77]

I need a little help with Linux. I'm running Ubuntu Server 10.10 64-bit edition on my Arima quad socket. I have two running and one is giving me a problem. I was looking through the event logs and not seeing anything helping. What I am seeing is the system is totally freezing up after sometime. No caps/num lock response and the screen doesn't wake from energy save mode. Fans and lights are on but no one is home...or crunching. A reboot brings it back up, but after a period of time [I'm still looking for this exact period] it goes into this freeze phase. Any tips on what to look for or should I just wipe it and move on? Thank you.

[D_A]

That sounds like a hardware issue, but it could be anything. Make sure the machine isn't fully hibernating or something like that as well (Ubuntu Server edition won't be doing that but the BIOS might, maybe), but run diagnostics on your hard drive and RAM and check your heatsink mounts. Failing that, it could be your power supply. Like I said, it could be anything.

[retro77]

Cool, Thanks DA.

[Gamekiller]

Virtual Ramdisk... oh how you elude me. Though, creating the ramdisk isn't really the main issue. I'm wanting to run an application (java game server) from my ram in the form of a ramdisk (of course). It seems I could either add the directory to my /etc/fstab file or just drag the folder into my /dev/shm directory. Issue is, assuming one of the two is right (no idea... been doing a few hours of Googling... it's 6:30am /drool).. anyways issue is that being a server it will need to remember the changes done to "world" done by the clients accessing the server so I'd need to back the ramdisk up to the HDD on a set interval. Right? No idea how this all works.

I'd like to have a ramdisk (200MB max size) that can dump to HDD every 5 minutes and also load from the HDD on boot (same dir that it's dumping/updating to on the HDD)

Sorry if this isn't super clear. I'm so tired that my sight has blurred. Reason for the ramdisk is for my Minecraft server which deals with a ton of tiny little files (thousands?) while running. The "world" or map is the part with all of the small files and it's constantly changing and being accessed.

Thanks!

[retro77]

Update on my situation: I took out 2GB or RAM and it's been stable all night. Seems I have some bad RAM maybe. Now some of my WUs are saying Waiting for Memory. I'll fiddle with it some more.

Edit 12/1: It seems to be back to normal. I left it alone and it's been running fine ever since. It was crunching super slow, then it seems to have picked up the pace back to what it should be.

[PoppaGeek]

Virtual Ramdisk... oh how you elude me. Though, creating the ramdisk isn't really the main issue. I'm wanting to run an application (java game server) from my ram in the form of a ramdisk (of course). It seems I could either add the directory to my /etc/fstab file or just drag the folder into my /dev/shm directory. Issue is, assuming one of the two is right (no idea... been doing a few hours of Googling... it's 6:30am /drool).. anyways issue is that being a server it will need to remember the changes done to "world" done by the clients accessing the server so I'd need to back the ramdisk up to the HDD on a set interval. Right? No idea how this all works.

I'd like to have a ramdisk (200MB max size) that can dump to HDD every 5 minutes and also load from the HDD on boot (same dir that it's dumping/updating to on the HDD)

Sorry if this isn't super clear. I'm so tired that my sight has blurred. Reason for the ramdisk is for my Minecraft server which deals with a ton of tiny little files (thousands?) while running. The "world" or map is the part with all of the small files and it's constantly changing and being accessed.

Thanks!

Sorry so slow to answer, health issues.

Unless someone has a more elegant solution I would write a script to copy the files to a backup directory on the hard drive. Run the script from crontab every 5 minutes. Then use a startup or init script to copy the files from the hard drive to the ram drive on startup/bootup. Make sure startup script is run after ram drive is mounted.

Example:
#!/bin/bash
cp /dev/ramdisk/gameserver/* /opt/gameserver/backup/

Make executable and add script name to /etc/crontab and set to execute every 5 minutes. Make sure all directories exist and are correct. Execute by hand to see if any errors.


Hope this helps.

[Gamekiller]

Thanks PG! I'll give that shot!

(Hope you feel better!)

[Gamekiller]

Is there a place that I can put a file to be ran when the system is being turned off? This goes along with my previous project.

[PoppaGeek]

Put a link to it in /etc/rc0/d

make sure it uses same naming convention as other files. Start with S and a number. Files are executed in numerical order. S90halt being last.

Linux Init Process

[Gamekiller]

Thanks once again PG!
Sorry to have so many questions but I mounted my ramdisk as /tmp/MC so do I need to format it to ext 4? Do I need to label it (/dev/MC1)?

This ramdisk is turning out to be a headache!

[D_A]

Ext4 is a nice fast journalling file system, but I don't know if it's faster than Ext2, which is older and simpler but doesn't have the journalling. If you do need to format it, experiment and see which gives you better performance.

Ok, a bit of poking around suggests you do need to format it when you create it and before you try to mount it.

[Gamekiller]

I did read that Ext2 is faster than Ext4 with journaling enabled but Ext4 is faster with it disabled. (no idea how to disable it)

I got it unmounted.
I can't figure out how to format it. Google is bearing no fruits.

Thanks, D_A!

Pretty much all I've done is:
mkdir -p /tmp/MC
/tmp/MC chmod 777
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=200M tmpfs /tmp/MC
umount /tmp/MC