Monthly Archives: October 2012

You are in a maze of twisty dependencies, all alike

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Catherine E. Pitt

We were recently asked to install a new piece of scientific software on one of the compute clusters. This software relies on a number of other pieces of software which we didn’t already have installed. And those in turn have … Continue reading →

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ngrep

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Adam Thorn

This week, I’ve spent some time analysing traffic on our network to try to get to the bottom of some slightly odd behaviour we’ve been seeing. Ordinarly I’d use tcpdump and/or wireshark. They’re great for capturing traffic and filtering by, … Continue reading →

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Invisible new servers

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Catherine E. Pitt

We have just installed a new pair of servers to help take the strain of running the network services that the department relies upon. This includes Admitto, the VPN services, and many others that are less visible but make Internet … Continue reading →

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Sleep talking

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Frank Lee

Do you talk in your sleep? It’s been a busy week and about 5pm tonight, we were finishing off bouncing some ideas round and contemplating going to the welcome party for new students. Then the new fileserver dropped offline. Completely. … Continue reading →

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Air flow

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Catherine E. Pitt

One of the department’s compute clusters has recently had an increase in usage. The air conditioning in its room is not keeping up with the load and some hot spots have developed. We are going to rearrange the room to … Continue reading →

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Pipe viewer

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Adam Thorn

I’ve been moving many terabytes of data between servers this week, and have been using a lot of piped tar commands to help out. Now it’s often useful to have a progress indicator when dong any sort of lengthy operation, … Continue reading →

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Thermal paste

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Catherine E. Pitt

We spent a lot of Monday tracking down a problem on one of the servers which hosts several important services, including the department’s remote access services. When the server failed at the weekend the services automatically failed over to another … Continue reading →

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