Opus Interactive | If These Servers Could Talk

About three weeks ago, a film crew from the news segment Inside Business Report came to Portland to film a feature on emerging data center technologies. Not familiar with Inside Business Report? It’s a 5 minute news segment that plays several times a day on television networks such as Discovery Channel, CNN Headline News, and other regional and local news shows. It’s hosted by actor and former presidential candidate Fred Thompson and has won numerous awards, including 9 recent Telly Awards.

Opus Interactive teamed with VMware, Intel and our client White Horse in showcasing the power of virtual servers running on the latest and greatest Intel processors. This technology is currently being utilized by many of our clients and it’s by far where we’re seeing the majority of interest from our prospective customers.

Our approach toward virtualization is validated by this great exposure. Typically Inside Business takes applications and proposals for their news reports on their site, but told us that they didn’t receive any that really demonstrated emerging solutions. After conducting a search of their own, they found Opus Interactive – proof positive that good things DO, and can, come in small packages.

The segment is currently in final production and it looks like it will air sometime in January or early February. We’ll certainly keep you posted!

One of the important tools in Web Hosting that sometimes gets overlooked is DNS, or Domain Name System. 

Without DNS, your computer would not know how to access the domain names you try to access on a daily basis.  DNS is used to translate computer hostnames to IP addresses so that computers can map information properly.  For instance, it is much easier to remember a hostname like www.google.com  rather than then its IP address of 209.85.171.104 when trying to go to Google’s website.

So, what happens in the time it takes between when you enter the URL into the address bar of your web browser and when the webpage appears?  I will explain in the following steps using Google as the example.

When you type www.google.com into your web browser, your computer searches to see if this is a registered domain, and if so obtains Name Server values from the Registrar where the domain is registered.

The Name Server values it finds at the registrar direct your computer to the proper Name Servers for www.google.com.

These Name Servers then provide an IP address of a web server that contains the website www.google.com.

Your computer then finds the information needed on this web server and displays that information on your computer monitor.

Without DNS your computer would not know what to make of the human-readable computer hostnames because everything on the Web is identified by an IP address.  So, in a way DNS serves as a “phone book” for the Internet by translating these easily remembered hostnames, like www.google.com, into IP addresses that networking equipment need for the proper delivery of information.

by Jeremy Sherwood

 Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. As they wait, every hour hundreds of people contract and die from infectious diseases. While computer owners run their screen savers, millions die from hunger, or environmental disasters devastate whole communities. What if each of the worlds estimated 1 billion computers could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?

To make this vision a reality, Opus Interactive has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 400 companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits, government agencies and academic institutions. Opus is encouraging members of the community to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org and becoming a member of the Opus Interactive team.

World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.

To join, individuals should go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid’s server. Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

“World Community Grid provides our busy members of the community with an efficient and effective way to make a difference on problems that plague humanity,” said Jeremy Sherwood, Strategic Account Manager. “We are asking individuals to join World Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of our communities.”

This write-up was tested on FreeBSD 6.2 and 6.3.  As of this writing the NTFS-3g release was 1.2531.
Please let me know if you run into typos or other technical issues when implementing this.

1.) Update the ports collection.

Setup the update:

Make it look something like this:

#######################################################
*default host=cvsup1.us.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/var/db
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs  tag=.
*default delete use-rel-suffix
#comment the below line if you don’t want to update the /src directory
#src-all
#update /usr/ports
ports-all tag=.
#######################################################

Run the update:

Update installed ports:

2.) De-install any existing packages.

Older versions don’t work properly for auto mounting in /etc/fstab.  In addition older versions of the kernel module and libraries won’t work with the latest version of fusefs-ntfs.

3.) Install the necessary packages.

4.) Load the kernel module

Enable the kernel module

edit /etc/rc.conf and add:

fusefs_enable=”YES”

Start the module

5.) Attach the USB drive.

Attach the USB drive and check your syslog for the detection of the drive:

Example:

Sep  8 09:19:47 servername kernel: umass0: Seagate FreeAgentDesktop, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 2
Sep  8 09:19:47 servername kernel: da1 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
Sep  8 09:19:47 servername kernel: da1: <Seagate FreeAgentDesktop 100D> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device
Sep  8 09:19:47 servername kernel: da1: 40.000MB/s transfers
Sep  8 09:19:47 servername kernel: da1: 476940MB (976773168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 60801C)

6.) Mount the USB drive.

If you get an error about the partition being hibernated:
Error opening partition device: Operation not permitted

Failed to mount ‘/dev/da1s1′: Operation not permitted

The NTFS partition is hibernated. Please resume and shutdown Windows properly, so mounting could be done safely.

Use:

That error message does sometimes point to a conflict in module and library versions though and cannot be fixed until the versions installed are correct.

Notes:

· If you want a persistent mount, be sure to add a mount entry to the /etc/fstab file or a post boot script such as rc.local.

· If you are done with the USB storage drive:

After going through the steps to update FreeBSD via cvsup, 3 of the servers didn’t come back up after reboot as fast as the other servers I updated did. After 10 minutes, of the server not coming back up, I realized something likely happened to the raid controller driver that these 3 servers use.

Once I got to the datacenter and hooked up a monitor and keyboard, I saw that I was correct, the raid controllers were not loading properly. Luckily I had the documentation, driver disk and floppy that was used to install them originally.

If you don’t have these items anymore, start here:

Those steps are from the documentation that came with the raid controller, but they did not work properly for me, so I started here:

The documentation also talked about going into the FreeBSD setup and hitting alt-F4 to get to a loader prompt, but that also didn’t see to work for me. After a few tries and several Google searches that didnt not result in telling me how to start booting from cd and finish from the hard drive, I fiddled around in the boot prompt options until I came across the boot_askname option.
After the boot process is started, you will be prompted for the boot partition.

The server will continue booting from here as if nothing was wrong. Now you can get back into your system and get the raid controller drivers back in place. I checked /boot/kernel before this step and found that the driver was no longer on the server.

After this reboot, everything will be same as before you updated the server.