Posted by John Frear on February 11, 2001 at 14:38:06:
Hello KDD!
I am writing to notify you of a change to the KDD user accounts, to notify you of a new system and to request some action on your part.
KDD has aquired a new machine which will act as a disk and accounts server for our core systems. The core systems currently are ringil and yavanna, and will soon include 6 new core systems which are informally known as the hobbits, and soon also an sgi origin 200 dual cpu system known as nienna.
We have a new system, known as fingolfin or fingolfin.user.cis.ksu.edu, and soon, fingolfin.kddresearch.org. This is an amd duron 800mhz system, with 256mb ram and a 30gb drive. You are welcome to log on to it and use it as you would any other kdd system.
Everyone has probably been getting used to having their home directory on yavanna and ringil being seperate things. Since kdd is expanding and adding new systems, it would be very cumbersome to have to
track each individual home directory which you have on each different system. So, what has been done is that now your home directories on all core systems will be linked by using NFS - the network file system. This
means that all your files and directories on ringil and on yavanna are the same -- if you create a directory on one system, its also on the other.
One issue which must be addressed now is merging the user data from yavanna and ringil onto your new home directory. Since a substantial number of the kdd users have their data on their ringil directory instead
of their yavanna directory, your kdd home directory for the core systems is what was your ringil home directory.
Since many of you have things only on your yavanna account and will want access to these thigns, that data is still available. You may access your yavanna data, from yavanna, at /orighome. Everything under
this directory is read-only, so if you do need to use things from this directory, please copy it from there to your home directory. One way you may copy entire directory trees is the command:
cp -R /orighome/username/path/to/mystuff /home/username/newhome
This will move something from the 'mystuff' directory from the old yavanna home directory onto a directory named newhome in your current home directory. Feel free to contact me if you would like assistance with this type of thing.
Eventually, the entire /orighome directory will be erased, so please make sure to grab anything which is important out of there before too long. (You'll have a month or so, but don't put it off 'till may or so!) Also, please make sure that what you would like to preserve isn't already in you home directory from ringil!
One problem that some people may run into is a synchronization one. For example, suppose you have been editing something on ringil. And you made a copy to yavanna. And you've edited that yavanna copy.
Well, whats in your home directory now is the _old_ ringil copy, so even though the file looks the same, you must realize that the thing you had been working on at yavanna is newer and should be used instead.
One advantage of our new fileserver is that it has a much larger drive than yavanna or ringil. Yavanna has a 4gb drive - ~1.2gb system software = 2.8gb space for users and add'tl software, and ringil had 810mb
available for user accounts -- now that we are sharing accounts from a new fileserver, kdd users have over 23gb available for their user accounts. Quotas are not implemented, so you may consume as much space as you like, however I would strongly discourage excessive use. If you want to store a cdrom image, or mp3 music, or other such large data, kdd also has many
scratch drives available for such things. (Well, prwally not for mp3's!) For example, I personally have ~8gb of cdrom images locally on kdd drives (that's not counting MSS), and yet my kdd home directory consumes 8mb. I do try to keep this trimmed so that I don't consume space from other users. Also, since home directories now load off the network, large files will be very slow, whereas large files on a scratch directory will load very quickly.
Unfortunately, there is a problem you may face temporarilly. Our new file server's network card was not intended to do heavy-duty fileserving. Under excessive load, the network card will momentarilly
freeze and then resume operation ~2seconds later. So, people may experience this problem - particurarly if you are doing a lot of i/o activitiy, such as compiling a program in your home directory. This
network card problem shouldn't actually cause any problems, only a bit of frustration and agony, so please be patient while we work with the vendor
to try to obtain a replacement card. Further, the file server is currently on a 10mbit network segment. The CIS department is getting some new 100mbit network switches, and once those are installed (I saw them
doing some config/test work on them today!) then we will move fingolfin from the 10mbit network to the 100mbit network, which should give much better response time.
If anyone has any questions or concerns please email them to admin@ringil.cis.ksu.edu so that both Dr. Hsu and I will have an opportunity to respond to you. Thank you, and I send my best to you all!
- John And if I close my mind in fear, please pry it open NO SOLICITING!