UNIX ADMINISTRATORS MEETING
June 6, 2006

The June Unix Admin meeting was held on Tuesday, June 6th at the Busch Campus Center. Newark Computing Services ran the agenda for the meeting.

Chris Wawak of NCS started off the meeting discussing whether a new FTP mirror site should be brought up again. The original FTP mirror - ftp.rutgers.edu - has been down for sometime now. The old FTP mirror site used to hold about 1.3 TB of data and was open to internal and external usage. Most members agreed a mirror should be brought back. Dan Reisman (ESS), having run ftp.rutgers.edu, stated that rate limits for connections should be put in place in order to ensure the service is not overwhelmed. This had been a problem before.

Some suggested mirrors to include were Solaris, CentOS, GNU, Debian, and CPAN. Chris would send follow-up email to the Unix Admin mailing list for further suggestions and discussion.

Newark has been using NetApp filers for over 6 years. NCS recently upgraded their NetApp infrastructure with NetApp 3020s. Their existing hardware was having performance issues and they were unclustered. The upgraded was completed in about 3.5 hrs - start to finish. NetApp provided techs on site to help with the migration. It was not without incident but the overall process went quite well. Nice feature of these NetApps is autosupport - NetApp techs call you when they sense an issue with the NetApp, often before you know about anything failing.

Nath Kaplan of NCS gave an overview of how to put together a disaster plan. He emphasized that Disaster Planning is everyone's responsibility and it dose not have to start at the top. The first step to developing a disaster plan is to do a Hazards Assessment of your area. One example of a Hazard Assessment would be (What if power goes out to your swipe access areas?¦ - Who has the master keys to get into the server room? How would access the server room? This is just one issue to look at.

Newark does a quarterly disaster planning sessions where they review actions in scenarios. They review lists of staff phone numbers. NCS is considering using a commercial site (e.g., bloggerspot) to do coordination if access to mail systems fails.

Click HEREfor Nath's disaster recovery planning document.

Tom Grzelak, OIRT, made announcements about the following:

• OIRT's demonstration and benchmarking cluster is now available for faculty and research staff. Expected uses are: learn how to put together a cluster, benchmark issues between 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, and benchmark performance between single core and dual core.
• IBM Tech Briefing on HPS/Clusters will be held on Tuesday, June 27th 9AM-1PM in Room 122ABC Busch Campus Center. Lunch will be served from 12PM-1PM. There will be presentations on system tracks, case studies, and financing issues. The keynote will be by Janis Landry-Lane who will look at speak on architectural considerations in HPC. Also, Curt Hillegas from Princeton will be speaking about their Blue Gene Linux Cluster (3.3 TF, one rack, draws 24KW of power). More info up on the OIRT website. Register at www.mainline.com/rutgers.
• Dell will be holding a day-long technical briefing Wednesday June 14th from 9AM-3PM. Topics will include discussions Dell security offerings, virtualization support with VMWare as well as systems tracks on servers, laptops, and desktops The briefing will be held in Room 004 in the Janice H. Levin Building, Livingston Campus. Register by sending an email to Jason Trumpy at jason_trumpy@dell.comi.
• Rutgers has just signed an agreement with Apple to become an iTunes university. Among many other things, this means that Rutgers will have its own location on the iTunes site. Faculty/Staff can create and post podcasts to the site and students can download the material to their ipods. More information will be posted on the site podcasts.rutgers.edu.

Jennifer Scalf, NCS, led a discussion of where unix admins get their unix/linux news, tips, etc. These included such sites as: http://slashdot.org
http://digg.com/
http://www.sunmanagers.org/
http://linuxquestions.org
http://ubuntuforoum.org
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/home/
http://sageweb.sage.org/
http://www.usenix.org
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa06/ (LISA Conferences)
http://www.usenix.org/events/sec06/ (USENIX Security Conferences)
http://ask.metafilter.com/ http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/faq.html
http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~jscalf/awk.txt
http://www.lopsa.org/
http://www.groupname.org/
Podcast: This Week in Tech http://twit.tv/

Adam Porter, IMCS, asked about what people were using for RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Responses included thunderbird, bloglines, firefox, and lilina.

The next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, September 5th at 1:30 PM in Center Hall, Busch Campus Center. New Brunswick Computing Services will run the next meeting.