[Bio-linux] Clone Questions

[Dawn Field]

Hi Kerr,

Glad to hear you are using the Bio-Linux machine and have some help on the sys admin side! 

Dan, our new EGTDC Linux sysadmin is now here (to introduce you - you'll meet in April when you visit).  Very importantly he is now officially maintaining the Bio-Linux FAQ.

Dan - are you already on the Bio-Linux list Milo started?  Kerr's questions, and any answers you provide would be great material for an "Advanced Bio-Linux Technical FAQ" that we could start writing.  If we start from today framing everything in the form of Q&A we'll very quickly hit a lot of the key issues.

cheers,
Dawn

>>> Kerr Wall <pkerrwall at psu.edu> 2/6/03 17:39:25 >>>
Hi Milo et all,

First off, I'd like to again thank you guys for such a wonderful machine.  I
couldn't be happier with your clone.

We just hired a new computer science student that will be helping with
system administration and programming.  His name is Siddharth Ray and his
email is rays at psu.edu.  I would like to have his name added to the list and
let you guys know that he might be shooting you emails from time to time as
he learns the administration on the clone.

The clone that I have running here has 2 80 GB hard drives.  I am wondering
what commands that I need to use to format the second hard drive (It came
with Windows XP so I think it would be formatted in FAT32).  We would like
to use reiserfs to allow for large files and would like to have it mounted
on '/usr/db' and set up its configuration to automatically mount when the
machine boots.

We have two other Dell machines that are nearly identical to the ones you
guys have in Oxford.  I want to clone both of these machines.  The first one
that I want to clone has a bad floppy drive.  The machine is running Windows
2000 right now and I have a zip drive attached through USB.  Can we still
clone without a floppy drive?  If so, I would like to do this next week.  I
still have the CD that I made back in October/November.  Once I clone this
machine, I will then clone the second machine that has a working floppy
drive.  We are cloning all of our linux machines in the lab to hopefully
make administration easier.

Two other issues that I'd like to get your thoughts on.  We are wanting to
set up one of the machines as a print server.  Do you guys have any thoughts
on this.  We need to set it up to allow for windows, mac os x, and other
linux (clones) to print to a laser jet printer and color ink jet printer
that I would assume would be attached to one of the clones.  Our previous
computer science dude set up cups, samba, and appletalk on a suse linux
computer that worked fine for about a month but I have been unable to
resolve the current issues.  He didn't leave any documentation on how he set
it up and I don't want to use Suse anymore.  Therefore, we will be starting
from scratch again.

We are in the process of resolving our backup problems and have gone to a
group here on campus that will automatically login every night to one of the
machines to backup.  We would like to set up all of the clones and me and
Jim's os x laptops in a  Network File System to allow for us to easily share
resources and get important files to the backup machine.  Do you guys have
any thoughts on NFS?  I am really tired of having to ssh to each of the
machines or scp things from my laptop to other computers and thought that
NFS would help remedy the situation.  But if this is too complicated, I
understand.

Thanks again,

Kerr
 

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