January 22, 2015

This is my first official opus post for HPC1. I am very excited for this course. This week, I have started out by setting up my own workstation. I have named my entire area/station “CasperStation” The PC at my station has a Pentium D processor and 2gb's of ram. It is not an extremely powerful machine, but it will do for our purpose. I have net-installed Debian with Wheezy on my PC. The installation process was straight forward, as I have dealt with this kind of installation before. At my station, I have dual monitors, an 8-port NETGEAR gigabit switch, wireless mouse, mousepad, keyboard, laptop, and a couple of other items. It is a pretty nice set-up if I do say so myself. I will supply a picture at the end of this entry. I had configured my station on the first day of class, which has allowed me to help others today who are just starting.

On my system, I had some fun learning about some simple admin management. I figured out how to add a new user to the system, add people to the sudoers group and file, where logs and group files are, and how to use the package manager to update, upgrade, and install new packages. With this new found knowledge, I first created a new user for Mohsin Malik. In the process, I learned about shadow passwords. I had decided to enable shadow passwords and then proceeded to expire his password so that the first time he logs in he will be forced to change his password (since it was some generic one I made up). I also added myself to root privileges (because who wants limitations)and added both Mohsin and myself to the sudoers group. Another thing I did was install some cool packages. I used apt-get to install chromium, wireshark, virtualbox, vim, and nmap. I also installed xampp, which ended up being an interesting process. I figured out that to run a .run file, I had to chmod +x the file so that I had permissions to execute it. I will probably end up downloading more packages in the future. I also changed some basic preferences like terminal colors and what not.

In class today, we learned about something that blew my mind. Matt also had to mention that it blew Thomas Hakes mind (A.K.A. Satan), the C.I.S.T. God/Founder. This “thing” would be the “jumper” that is contained within the motherboard of a computer. If one is ever in the situation where they must get around a BIOS password, they can simply unplug this small “jumper” and turn the computer back on to disable the password. The jumper can then go back in the motherboard and you can continue in editing your BIOS settings. It is such a simple but amazing phenomenon.

I'm not sure there is much more to say for this week. I just started messing around with the command top on my system, because I like to see what is happening resource and process wise. One issue that I know I will need to solve in the future is re-allocating half of my hard drive to make a new partition (something we will need for later in class). That is about it so here is a nice picture of “CasperStation.”

February 2, 2015

I am making this opus entry on the start of the week after what it was meant for. This is because I was working so furiously on the Linux From Scratch project, that I literally had no time to spare for opus entries. Last week, I had finished chapters 1-5 of the Linux From Scratch project. At this point, I believe that I am the farthest ahead. I had made a wise decision in choosing to use Debian as it is more of a mainstream linux os, which makes it less likely for errors to occur. So far, I have not had any issues. Matt on the other hand is using Arch Linux and has had compilation issues in the temporary system section. In general, I think that this project is relatively easy because of how straight forward it is. Everything is basically spoon fed to us from the tutorial. I am learning a lot about the architecture of linux systems throughout this project. I have noticed that I am really becoming familiar with a lot of the mainstream packages.

My hopes for this week are that I finish chapter 6 of the LFS tutorial, which will be building the new system. I know that chapter 6 is going to be the longest chapter, so I'm not sure if I will be able to finish it all in one week. Chapter 6 consists of building the new system with the temporary system. This means that I will have to recompile everything plus more. Like I had said before, I did not have any real issues compiling in chapter 5. It mostly was just time consuming compiling each package. The chapters before chapter 5 were also relatively easy. Chapter 4 dealt with creating the work space for the temporary system, setting up a user for the temporary system, etc.

Overall, the project is going as planned. I think that I will be able to finish it quite early. If I am able to finish it early, I would like to try LFS again, but this time using SystemD. I am not sure if anyone else decided to try SystemD, but I heard that it is a lot different.

February 5, 2015

This week has been an interesting week for the LFS project. Up until this week, I had not run into any problems. I can no longer say that I have not run into any problems now. First, on Tuesday, I began chapter 6 of the LFS project. The first couple of sections went by smoothly up until the compilation of man-pages. However, once I got to the first Glibc compilation pass, things started to go wrong. Once I got to using the test suit on glibc, the test suite decided to hang up on the same part of the test. I left it running all night and it still was just sitting at the same thing. Wednesday, I had to delete all of the glibc directories and do it over again. This resulted in a success and the test suite only had 1 error. For the rest of Wednesday, I was able to finish compilation and install glibc. Today, I made a huge mistake. I came in to proceed with LFS and forgot exactly what had to be done next. Wednesday night, I had left glibc installing so that it was done by today. When I came to the lair today, I forgot that I still had to configure glibc and I ended up deleting all of the glibc directories. Therefore, I have to do all of the glibc compilation again.

There was something truly amazing that happened today with the project. I set up an ssh daemon and installed tmux. I can now work on all of this from home. Let me say that tmux is so amazing. I can't believe that I had been living without it all of this time. I also found out about a cool program that is like top better. It is called htop. I prefer it over top because it has some nice gui features. Besides that, there is not much else to say for this week. I will stay updated this weekend on my progress.

February 9, 2015

Today was an interesting day. The college decided to stay open during a snow day. Besides that, I was not able to work much on LFS over the weekend. I was compiling the first pass of gcc this weekend. On Saturday, I accidentally woke up and pushed CTRL + A D (a natural instinct from detaching so many screen sessions) and it destroyed my tmux session. This was after gcc finished compiling. I might be fine to just start a new tmux session, chroot back in, and then continue, but I also had about 40 errors out of 1000 passes in the test suite. Even though this might not really be an issue, I think that I am going to completely redo the installation of gcc to make sure nothing goes wrong, and to see if any of the errors are fixed the second time. That is about it. Matt is at the last section of LFS where he makes his system bootable. I was hoping to get to that point by tomorrow. Looks like I might have to take a little more time.

February 12, 2015

This week has been a pretty easy week for lfs so far. I have been working through chapter 6. Really, I am just having to compile and configure all of the packages for the actual system. This is a relatively repetitive process and just takes time. I haven't had any issues since last week. Matt was telling me how his LFS system broke after it was working, so I have decided that once I get my system bootable, I will back it all up. Then, if anything happens once I start to mess with it, I will be able to just go to a backup.

February 23, 2015

Today is the day before the newest week of HPC starts. I have not done anything with LFS in a while. Last week happened to be break week which was nice. I was in Utah all week and did not end up doing anything on lab46. I was hoping to make my system bootable over break; however, that is obviously now not the case. I went to check my tmux session, and though it says it exists, it does not actually allow me to attach to it. I am not exactly sure what part of chapter 6 I was working on, but I know that I was simply compiling programs. I know that I have the section open though on my computer at the lair. With this said, I will not be continuing LFS until tomorrow. I am not sure how much more time we have left to do LFS, but I know I heard Matt say that we might be wrapping it up this week. I know I am farther ahead than a majority of the class, so I am not too worried. A couple people have already finished. Since they have fully working copies of the tools and system, we should all be able to just use their copies. I do still want to finish my system by myself though. I just don't know if time will allow for it. A lot of the process in LFS is quite repetitive at this point, so I am not sure as to how beneficial completing the LFS system will be for me, but it certainly is interesting. I know that the chapters after chapter 6 will be beneficial, because they are not simply about compiling programs but about configuring and making the newly made system usable. This is really what I want to be working on at this point. Matt Page was able to do this and start adding extra things to his system. Hopefully, this week I will be able to do the same. I might not be able to complete it though just because of all of my other classes. It is going to be a very busy week since we just had break. I won't be able to work on LFS all day every day like I had been doing up to this point.

I am really interested to see what we do after this project. I would like to learn how to put together a system such as lab46. Something specific that would be cool to do is create a pod system like the ones in the lair. This has always interested me. Some other projects that would interest me would be creating system administration tools. Last semester in unix/linux we created some cool bash scripts for grading purposes. Matt also showed us his own scripts he made for managing system resources. I think it would be cool to expand on this and create some of our own system administration tools. I was already coming up with some ideas such as going through access logs to alert administrators of malicious/un-successful attempts and what not. I would also like to possibly get into some client-server type stuff. I guess this goes back to the whole idea of setting up a lab46. Anyway, I am going to sign off for tonight. I will be back in the lair all day tomorrow with sushi. Yes I said sushi. Sushi is amazing. Thanks to Shawn the sushi master for starting the lair sushi lunch trend. It is greatly appreciated. P.S. I was just thinking about other projects. It would be very cool to do something with raspberry pis. I noticed that there is a brand new version of the raspberry pi out with better specs. I want to purchase one of these and then figure out a cool project to do. Originally, I was thinking I might do LFS on that, but then I was not able to purchase one in time.

February 25, 2015

This week I have been working more through chapter 6. I had decided to stop running test suites for some of the programs where they were not mentioned as critical. The reason for doing this is to save time. Matt Page had told me that the people in the LFS irc chat said that they really were not needed. I want to do them all, but it seems that Matt wants us to finish up this project. I made it up to compiling kbd today. Now I am having major issues. These issues occur when trying to compile kmod. For some reason I am getting the following error upon making kmod:

root:/sources/kmod-18# make
make --no-print-directory all-recursive
Making all in .
  CCLD     libkmod/libkmod.la
/usr/lib/liblzma.so: file not recognized: Is a directory
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
Makefile:1220: recipe for target 'libkmod/libkmod.la' failed
make[2]: *** [libkmod/libkmod.la] Error 1
Makefile:1833: recipe for target 'all-recursive' failed
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
Makefile:1039: recipe for target 'all' failed
make: *** [all] Error 2
root:/sources/kmod-18#

As seen, this is a pretty serious error and the package is obviously something that I cannot overlook. I started digging for similar issues that people have had online. In the error, it references the library /usr/lib/liblzma.so which is compiled in the Xz package. I'm not sure why it is having an issue with trying to recognize liblzma.so as a file, because it should be a directory. Not sure why it would be looking for that as a file in the first place. Of course I tried recompiling Xz multiple times and everything in-between. This did not seem to fix the issue. I'm thinking there might be some issue with symbolic links or where things are placed. I am not sure how this would happened but it is extremely irritating that I am having issues this far into LFS. I definitely do not have time to redo the project. I am going to ask Matt if he has any suggestion tomorrow. If we are not able to fix the issue, Dan has offered to give me a copy of his working LFS system. This is definitely a last resort though. I really want to do the entire project by myself.

March 2, 2015

To follow up on what happened with the huge error from last week, Matt was able to end up fixing the issue that I had. Apparently, one of the links for the libraries was linked to the folder outside of the actual file that I needed. I did not have the proper knowledge when going into the troubleshooting to fix this, but Matt was able to see what the issue was and fixed it in about 1 minute. I am very thankful that it was able to be fixed. I had my suspicious that is was going to be a quick fix. I just was not sure as to was exactly needed to be done. With the error fixed, I was able to finally complete chapter 6. I ended up successfully compiling all of the packages that needed to be compiled. Another thing that I ended up doing was starting to do all of the test suites again. This was partially because the previous error that I had encountered scared me into this, but it is also because the test suites ended up not taking as long as the test suites found in the first set of packages. With the time not being as much of an issue, I deemed the test suites as useful. All test suites from this point on ended up passing with flying colors. In fact, I don't believe that there were any errors in any of the test suites with the last packages. This allows me to sleep better knowing that things are definitely working properly. One issue that I had encountered that was not so much of an LFS issue, but just a general knowledge fail on my part was with VIM. The test suite for Vim itself (if I am remembering correctly) opened vim sessions for testing. I had not realized this and started typing things in it. This was a mistake as it was in command mode. I ended up having multiple vim sessions open and had a very hard time figuring out how to fully close vim. I guess I really should learn vim at some point.

Besides that, chapter 6 was relatively easy to finish up. I should mention a couple things though. After compiling Vim, there are some cleanup sections such as section 6.72. The parts that deleted all of our “no longer needed” tools I skipped. Really, the main point of this seemed just to free up space. I am not worried about space though and I decided it would be beneficial to have a copy of my tools in case anything went wrong or if I wanted to start a certain part over. I also talked to Matt Page about this and he said he also skipped these sections of the chapter. I am very happy that I have completed chapter 6 finally. This means that I can move to chapter 7, which is some system configuration and then configure my system to be bootable. This is going to be a very exciting week for LFS.

March 3, 2015

Today I have moved to chapter 7 of lfs. This was interesting because it has a lot of configuration in it. It offers a nice change of tasks that have to be done.I started out by reading through all of the information that was supplied about how certain parts of LFS will function. One of the big things covered was Module Handling. This was very interesting and it taught me some things that happened behind the scenes when connecting devices to the computer. I did however find that this was a bit above my head. I could understand the concept in most cases, but only to a certain level. More specifically, it was a bit confusing to me to understand the exact details of udev and udev interacting with the kernel. Whenever we had to create anything like rules, I just used the defaults. After that section in chapter 7, I got to the network configuration. Most of this was pretty self explanatory. I was quite familiar with it, but there were a couple things that I was unsure of such as a domain for the lair and what not. At this point, I have decided to wait until Thursday to ask some questions and complete chapter 7.

March 5, 2015

Today I am picking up back where I left off Tuesday (ethernet configuration). I ended up configuring my ethernet with the following information:

ONBOOT=yes
IFACE=eth0
SERVICE=ipv4-static
IP=10.80.1.187
GATEWAY=10.80.1.1
PREFIX=24
BROADCAST=10.80.1.255 

Apparently, I am on a different network than the other people doing LFS. They are on 10.80.2.? while I am on 10.80.1.? Since the ip configuration is static, I spoke to Presly to make sure I found an appropriate IP address that wasn't in use. That is how I ended up using 10.80.1.187 This will be changing though because Matt is having us create our own subnets. Honestly, I don't even have to configure any of the network configuration until LFS boots, but I figured it was easy/fast enough to configure something now. The next thing to do was to configure the resolve.conf file for dns. I just used googles dns servers, but I believe that these will probably just be overridden with whatever is configured on the lair router. I also just ended up leaving the domain blank. I also ended up not configuring anything in the hosts file except for the default loopback ip (127.0.0.1). I was thinking about configuring it in correlation to what was on the host os, but I decided it didn't really matter. After the network configuration, there was some more basic configuration for the system such as time and language stuff. That was pretty east to work through. I ended up finishing the rest of chapter 7 pretty fast. I talked to Matt Page about a couple of the things just for reference to see if he added any extra configuration.

The next step in the process was to start Chapter 8. In chapter 8, the two main things that were done were configuring the linux kernel and grub. This was actually pretty exciting knowing that I was so close to being able to use my new system. The first thing I had to do was configure the kernel. I have never messed with the kernel in any OS before, so I had no idea what to expect. I ran through all the initial config to prepare the kernel for compilation. After that, I edited the kernel. Well, I should so I went into the configuration menu for it. I did not actually edit anything the first time. Matt Page told me that he had to add something for his ethernet card, but I decided to see if I would not have that problem. I ended up just using all of the defaults. The next step was compiling the kernel. This took about 20-30 minutes, which really was not that bad. Then there was a little bit more configuration after compilation. Once that was all finished, I got to the Grub configuration. What I ended up doing, after talking to Matt Page, was using my host os grub to boot LFS. The reason being, if I installed grub for lfs, I would either boot into the lfs grub from the host os grub (going through two menus), or replace the existing grub with the lfs grub. This seemed kind of pointless and I ended up just using my host os grub for lfs. It was an easy 30 second config change. With this done I was able to bypass all of the rest of the grub configuration section. Lastly, I registered as completing lfs and set the version and what not of my lfs system. :) Then the moment of truth came. Did my system boot. Yes it did. My system booted without any issues EXCEPT for an issue with the ethernet card. It could not identify any ethernet card. This was the same exact issue that Matt Page had. After a simple edit to the kernel to add support for a specific intel card, I recompiled the kernel and tried rebooting. Voila! My system was completely bootable AND the ethernet now worked. This was amazing. I was logged into my LFS system that was made from scratch. I was able to ping google.com from my LFS system. Mission accomplished. I have decided to end here for this week. My plans for my system include setting up tmux and some other packages that would be useful from Beyond Linux From Scratch. Also, I will be configuring my ethernet for use with the subnet that I will be creating. This will all be started next week. For now, I am so happy that I have completed LFS. Yay! Here is a pretty picture of me being logged into my LFS system. :D

March 10, 2015

It is the start of a new week in the lair! Last week I finally finished LFS. I am very happy about this achievement. Today I am going to make sure that I end up backing it up. Basically, all I did to backup my lfs was re-mount the lfs file system and then literally copy the entire filesystem. This allows other people working on lfs to take my “image” if you will of lfs. I then gzip and tarred this so that it was all one compressed file. It actually was not as large of a file as I thought it would end up being. If I remember correctly, it was less than a gig. If you think about most OS's being at least a couple of gigs big, that is pretty good. I was then going put my LFS image onto my lab46 public html so that other could easily download it. This is where I ran into some interesting things. I got my first taste of SCP or Secure Copy Protocol. This is a neat little tool that dan showed me for easily transferring files between linux systems. It uses SSH over TCP port 22. It is extremely fast and easy to use. I literally just need to specify the hostname, login, file I want to send, and destination. With this newly found tool, I tried to send my LFS image to Lab46. This is where I ran into an issue. I noticed that connection would close exactly when 256MB's had been transferred. I tried repeatedly but the same issue arose at the same exact condition. This already had me thinking that there was probably a size restriction; however, I was not getting an error that specifically said this. I decided to ask Presly for some guidance. He was a little puzzled by the issue, but he also was thinking that it was probably a size limitation that Matt had issued on Lab46 for file transfers. Presly then had a very good idea and tried a different method of transferring the file. This is where I learned a second new tool. This tool is called netcat. I was actually even more impressed by netcat because of its simplicity, power, and flexibility. Netcat essentially allows your to transfer raw data from one place to another. This means that I can literally cat a file and send that output to a remote machine via netcat. This is incredible. The way it works is that you specify any open port on the remote machine to start listening for traffic. Then, you send the data from your host machine to that port that you have opened for traffic on the destination machine. You can even choose between TCP and UDP protocol. I though that it was so cool that you could just send raw data so easily from one location to another on virtually any port. Anyways, Presly had tried doing this with my LFS image and that is when we finally got our answer. Yet again, another failed file transfer. The difference? This time, using netcat, a very specific error message was given. I can't remember the exact message, but it quite literally said that sending this file exceeds the size limit set by the remote system. This was a cool little adventure that I took which showed me a couple new tools, some information about lab46, and a wonderful experience hanging out with some lair friends. Besides that, not much happened in the lair. I did not end up getting to configuring my subnet. I figured this is not an issue, because I am so far ahead anyway. I guess I will be heading out for today!

March 11, 2015

I ended up coming to the lair today just because I felt like coming in. Actually, now that I think about it, I have been coming into the lair basically everyday it has been opened this semester. It has become a habit (a good one of course). Today I had planned on setting up my subnet with dan. However, it can be seen that I used the words “had planned.” This plan actually did not end up becoming a reality. I was trying to remember the config files Matt had originally showed me in the router, but I needed to actually do some digging in the filesystem to really remember what they were. This digging also gave me a good layout of the filesystem on the router. First of all, an observation I made is that I believe the router is using pfSense, maybe? I remember this from the old CIST days when Thomas Hakes was trying to set up a router on a spare server using pfSense. Anyway, the motd had directions on where things were located , so it wasn't too hard to find most of what I was looking for. The main issue was that I couldn't find one of the files that I was looking for. This file actually had information regarding the specific subnet and adresses that were allocated for me specifically. Obviously, I needed to find this so I knew what to configure. I found the actual files that I need to add configurations too, but this wasn't very helpful without finding the file with my subnet information in it. I was not able to get help from Matt at this time so I decided to call it quits at the lair for today and come back tomorrow for some help. I was just hoping that the config file had not been deleted or overwritten.

March 12, 2015

Today I hope to finally resolve my whole subnet router file config issues blah blah blah. The main thing that I am dealing with today is time. I have a very busy schedule. I promised Dan and Matt that I would walk them through Object Oriented Programming in Java with some logic examples from our computer org class. This actually went pretty well. We ended up making an entire customized Nand “object” that correctly fits the requirements for our CPU simulator. We also started writing an RSNandLatch object for the CPU simulator, but that is when time got the best of us. Dan had to leave, and Matt had to catch a bus not too long after. We were able to give ourselves a quick refresher though of what a latch actually does, how it is constructed, and what the states of a latch are. This was quite helpful to me. I believe the time spent was a success. At the very least, it helped me reinforce what I already knew about Java and the logic gate objects for our CPU simulator. Once that was finished, I had to wait for Matt to finish his C lab. In the meantime, I tried to help Mohsin with a project he had to to in his C lab and another project that he had for his Unix/Linux course. I am actually surprised at how differently each of these courses are taught now. The projects in the Unix/Linux course are completely different than what we had. They actually make me want to take the course again, because they use very interesting tools that I have never used before. Anyway, to kill more time, I decided to go through the router again to try and locate that missing file that I was trying to find. I found some more interesting configuration files, but I was unable to locate the file specifying my subnet information. I knew it must be in there somewhere. Finally, Matt's C lab had finished and I was able to just ask him. Apparently, the file that I was looking for was in /etc and was named hostname.re0 It's funny because I thought that it was one of the hostname config files, but apparently I did not check all of them. The information that I needed and retrieved from this file was:

inet alias 10.80.9.89   255.255.255.248 10.80.9.95 # Casper Clay

Now that I got this information, I can continue in setting up my subnet. However, that will have to end up waiting until next week. It was already getting too late to stay at the lair. Somehow, even though I was about to leave, I got caught up in a conversation about discrete mathematics with some students who are taking it this semester with Joe. I had actually taken this course before with Alicia. I think the main reason I became involved was because they needed to write something in Java, and they had noticed that I was somewhat competent in programming with Java. After a good long talk though, I ended up going home.

March 16, 2015

It is a Monday night and I realized I need to finish my opus for last week. So that is what I am doing right now. I guess I will talk about my plans for this coming week. I hope to finally get my subnet set up (it shouldn't take too long), I want to start adding things to my LFS system since it is finally backed up, and I would like to update my bios since apparently that is what people had done for HPC last week. I am hoping that this doesn't cause any issues to my system as Marcus had a fatal error that altered his computer unusable after he updated his bios. Luckily for him though, Matt was able to fix this problem. With these goals in mind, it is going to be a very busy week. I have a PHP Midterm that I am taking on Wednesday, a Calculus exam that I am taking on Friday (I hate life), logic gates that need to be finished for computer organization, and I am also making a trip up to RIT on Wednesday to get check out their housing and make a decision. All very exciting stuff, but it is definitely going to be a busy week. I already had fun today doing about 5 hours of Calculus, 2 hours of computer organization, and and hour for this opus. I really am going to enjoy the break that is coming up. Anyways, that is all for now.

March 17, 2015

So today was an interesting day for the lair. I came down to the lair to find out about a new way that Matt has decided to fight the “suits” in their agenda to get rid of the lair. Now as Matt pointed out, it is one thing to sell the BDC and relocate the lair, but the “suits” want to completely get rid of the lair. For some reason, they do not understand that the lair is more than a regular computer lab such as C108. This is extremely upsetting, because many of Matt's courses rely on the space and resources that the lair provide. Not only is the lair needed for classes, but it is also an important place for students to get help, work on homework, and stay interested in the program. Now as others have pointed out, a multitude of programs around the college have their own similar dedicated spaces. The fact that the “suits” have decided that the lair is not needed is simply ridiculous. It is an invaluable resource to the entire computer science program, and I honestly feel that if the lair were to be removed, it would be detrimental to the whole program. It would not only hurt the colleges Computer Science program, but it would also directly hurt the students. I personally am not sure how far along this whole removing of the lair has gone as far as plans go, but I am truly upset that it has come to this. Now getting back on to the plan, Matt has decided to gather all former and past students to give their words on what the lair means to them. This will then be put on posters that will be delivered to the people in charge of these decisions. I think this is a good idea, because it will hopefully shine some light on how the lair affects the students. Hopefully, it will make a difference, but lets be honest, will they really read it? I guess time will tell.So anyway, this has kind of turned into a side project for HPC. I am not sure what I want to write yet, but I know that I will definitely say something meaningful.

Today I had also planned on getting my subnet setup since I now knew what needed to be done. This did not happen though. I actually ended up doing something that I really needed to concentrate a little more time on. I have recently been spending more time on Computer Organization material. With this said, I had finished writing an RSNandLatch in java and wanted to write it on the white board so that I could explain it to Dan and Matt. This also helped me notice possible issues and allowed me to more easily recognize better ways to make my code more efficient. I finished doing that and was pretty happy with it. Then, of course, Sam decided he needed to come over and take a picture of my completed code so that he could probably go home and copy it. Oh well. What can you do. So that is what consisted of my day at the lair. I do believe I spent another good hour talking to people about the lair and “suits” issues, but that was about it. Tomorrow I won't be in the lair, because I will be going up to RIT for a visit. I will be meeting up with Harry though and will have to tell him about the lair.

March 19, 2015

So yesterday I had visited RIT. Harry said that he was definitely on board for Matt's lair plan. He also said he would tell all of the former CCC students at RIT. It seems that the plans are coming together and might be effective. Lets hope for the best. I am still not sure what I am going to write. This week has been such a busy week for me. I just finished a PHP midterm, and have a calculus exam tomorrow. At least break week is coming up. Also, this weekend and next week should be relatively relaxed. Anyway, today at the lair I was determined to once and for all set up my subnet. Did it actually happen? Yes it did! I finally got my subnet set up. This made me pretty happy. The only thing that I am unsure about is whether it was setup properly. I restarted my computer and I was not put on the subnet I had just created. This seemed a little sketchy, but Marcus told me that he had to wait about 2 days for the router to update. I wasn't sure if this was legit, but I decided to take his word for it since Matt was busy. I also tried a DNS flush and DHCP lease renew, but that only resulted on me getting a new IP on the network that I was currently a part of. I guess I will have to see by next week. I decided to call it quits though for the rest of the day at the lair. It has been a crazy week and I need to dedicate my time towards this calculus test that I have tomorrow. Until next week, goodbye!

March 23, 2015

So it is a new week! I decided not to do much over the weekend. I tried to connect to my computer at the lair through the subnet IP that is should be under, but this was not successful. I am thinking that either something was not configured correctly, or my computer needs to be restarted again to update its network configuration now that the router should be updated. I am kind of leaning towards my configuration being incorrect though. Even though Marcus had told me the router needed a couple of days to update, Dan told me he didn't think this was the case, and after all, I had done a conf update dns, dhcp, and all. I would think this would have updated everything that would need to be updated. I guess I will see tomorrow when I go into the lair. Oh, I also forgot that I wanted to talk about what I hope to achieve this week. Seeing as the subnet should be finished, I would like to update my bios and start beyond linux from scratch. I guess the bios thing isn't really important to do on my computer, but I want the experience. The linux from scratch stuff is really what I want to start picking up on again this week. If I can get tmux on my LFS, I will be able to work on LFS over break week, which is next week. Matt Page has told me that Matt plans on giving each LFS system a particular role on a network. For instance, Matt Page might be the webserver, I might be the database, and maybe Dan would be the Email server. I think this is a great idea, because it kind of leans toward the whole setting up a lab46 idea that I had. Anyways, I will definitely be picking this back up this week. I have already made plans to spend most of tomorrow in the lair. Also, I mustn't forget that I need to feelings for the lair on the posters. I hopefully will think of something meaningful to put down in the next couple of days. Thinking of that, I guess this week we will also see Harry in the lair since he said that he is on break week this week and wanted to come down. Alright. That's it for now! Can't wait for another wonderful day in the lair tomorrow!

March 26, 2015

So today I finally got my subnet working today. There was a small issue where I was off by one address for the router IP. I in-fact did not have to wait 2 days for the router update. This is dealt with when issuing the conf update command for dns and dhcp. I originally though that, but I was told otherwise and believed otherwise hoping that the configuration was set up right. The second thing I did today was set upmy virtual machine for the new class project. The new class project is going to consist using new virtual machines to set up a network kind of like I had mentioned before with the lfs machines. Thankfully we are not actually using our LFS machines. I feel like that would just turn into a huge mess with a bunch of issues. I really like that we are taking a shift in the projects now though. Actually, now that I think of it, that might be a project we are doing after, this one might be the cluster of computers that we are making. Regardless, it still requires the new vm's. I have decided that I am going to stop anything I am doing with LFS from this point on. I got it fully running with ethernet, so I don't technically feel that I need to be obligated to do anymore. I would like to, but it is not the best thing to spend a bunch of time on right now, since I have a number of other projects to work on.

Anyway, back to the new project, we are using virtual box by Oracle to create our virtual machines. Thankfully, I have used virtual box a number of times, so I am very familiar with it. In-fact, I already had installed virtual box on my host machine, so I was all ready to go. Matt said that he wanted all of the virtual machines to be created and configured exactly the same. As a class, we decided to go with a 32 bit version of debian. We would have used 64-bit, but the PC that I am using does not support virtualization, which is a needed feature to create 64bit virtual machines in virtual box. I felt kind of bad being the only one in the class without this, but honestly, were not really going to see any difference between using 32bit and 64bit in the project. Most of the machines don't even have more than 4 gigs of memory anyway, so there would be no memory advantage to using it. The next decision we made was to configure all of the virtual machines with a dynamic hardrive. Basically, this means that the hard drive will get bigger as more storage is needed. The advantage to this is that we only use as much storage as we need, but I tend not to use this feature as it can be somewhat resource intensive. Regardless, the rest of the class wanted to used dynamic hard drives. There probably wont be much of a performance issue anyway. The hard drives will start at 8gb and go on from there. Then, we needed to make a standard for the amount of ram used. I believe that we are dedicating either 1/4 or 1/2 a gig of ram. I forgot to be honest because I am writing this a few days after we went over it. Lastly, network wise, we are all going to be using the subnets that we created for our domains. We will then be associated hostnames for ever machine using the naming scheme of ws#. For example, Dan is ws0, Matt is ws1, and I am ws3. I really like how this project is coming together. I think it is going to be a great experience and something that is fun. Matt Haas said that we will be setting up things like an email server, authentication server (something easier than LDAP), a web server, and similar things like that. Well unless the project we are doing is the cluster computing one, which might actually be the case. If it is the cluster computing project, we will be pooling all of the computers together over the network to combine their computational power. Then we can do cool things like cracking passwords and such. I also think this is a pretty cool project. Something I have never done before and something that would definitely be a very very cool project. Anyways, I am signing off for today. Not much else to go over. Next week is spring break, so I am looking forward to having a good week off. I don't think that I will really be doing anything over break for this class, although I do need to finish what I will be saying to try and keep the lair open. Matt will be putting those posters together over break.

April 6, 2015

So it is the week after spring break. I am all refreshed and ready to get back to school related stuff. As I had thought, I didn't do anything for hpc over break. There wasn't really anything to do anyway. I did end up getting my lair essay sent to matt so that he could put together the posters to send to the college executives. I didn't get it proof read like I wanted to, but I think it is fine. Hopefully my contribution will help. I actually ran into Matt today at the college, just as he was giving DJ the posters to be given to the execs. It will be interesting to see if they actually do anything. Like I have mentioned previously, the college really cannot go without the lair. It's pretty sad that we have to fight this battle in the first place. Anyway, it has become a tradition to talk about what I want to get accomplished in the lair for the week each Monday. I don't actually have many plans at the moment. I am all caught up/ ahead of everyone in the class right now. Next I just need to figure out what the next steps for our new project are. This week should be a pretty good week though. Not too stressful. I made sure to stay all caught up in my classes. Anyway, nothing else to really say. I guess I will see everyone in the lair tomorrow. I think I might get some picture of the lair and make a collage tomorrow, just so that I am able to remember how amazing it is once it's gone. Alright, peace.

April 7, 2015

So today nothing was really done in HPC. I ended up mostly doing work for computer organization. I have added more schematics to the whiteboard and programmed the objects in Java. The specific objects this time were decoders. What was interesting is that I made the decoders from other decoders. I though that was pretty cool. I also was experiencing a lot of network problems today in the lair. For some reason, I kept loosing connection at CasperStation. I meant to tell Matt, but I never got the chance to. Basically, nothing else happened today to talk about.

April 8, 2015

Today I came into the lair just to hang out and work on random things. I ended up hanging out in one of the other classes and we did a data recovery project that the unix/linux class was working on. It was pretty cool. I learned about a new command called dd. It is quite easy to use and relatively handy. Not much else to say for today.

April 9, 2015

So apparently the HPC class encountered the same network issue I had earlier in the week. I guess they spent the entire class fixing that issue. SO basically, we didn't do anything in HPC this week. The people who needed to finish making their virtual machines finished that, but I had done that the week before. I did ask Matt about the opus word count, because I have really been running out of things to say recently. Thankfully, he said that the word count isn't really something that I need to worry about. I am glad to hear this, because right now we really have not been doing enough in hpc to write about and meet the word count. Anyways, I ended up staying in the lair until 7:45 tonight talking to people. We had a grand old time. Nothing else to say. I guess that's it for the lair this week.

April 13, 2015

It is yet another week of CCC. This past weekend was actually my 20th birthday, so I had some fun celebrating that. Nothing was really done for HPC over the weekend, but there was nothing to do for it honestly. We didn't end up doing anything for class last week. Hopefully this week we will make some good progress on our cluster/network project. I guess I will see tomorrow.

April 14, 2015

So today is a new week at the lair. I am excited to see what we are doing this week. I decided to come into the lair early before calc today to see exactly what was going to get done during class. Apparently, today either a file system or authentication server was set up. Apparently there wasn't anything I needed to do though? I came in and Matt said it would be easier to just do a different time and only takes 5 minutes. Also, I guess people put their virtual machines for the cluser on their subnets. Apparently there is an issue though so none of them are working properly. I was told to just wait. That's all for today.

April 16, 2015

The last day for this week in the lair. I feel like its another week of doing nothing. Apparently, nothing was really done again in hpc, and anything that was done is not working properly, so I was told to just wait before I do anything. At this point, I am honestly not learning anything in HPC. I have just been taking advantage of the time in the lair to work on stuff for computer organization. I guess we will see what we end up doing next week.

April 20, 2015

It is the day before a new lair week. Matt is not going to be holding classes tomorrow though. I believe he has conferences. I won't be going into the lair anyway, because I am going to be doing some IT work at a place that I sometimes do IT contract work at. I guess tomorrow is a win win situation. I noticed that the EOCE is now up for hpc0. It looks like we just are reflecting on the class vs. demonstrating skills. I guess this is fine, but I feel like we really are just doing nothing at this point. I suppose Matt is pretty busy at this point with his other courses, and I know that I can use the extra time towards my other courses. Anyway, I guess I will work on the EOCE this week and get a good chunk of it done. I also want to configure my virtual machine to be on my subnet, even if it is not working properly at the moment. That is all I have to say for now.

April 23, 2015 So this week we set up NIS. The cluster is basically now somewhat set up at a base level. We can log into other work stations. Our home directories are all on Tyler Mosgroves computer (if I am remembering correctly). I was surprised at how simple it is to set up NIS, but there was also probably a lot of behind the scenes things that Matt did.

May 5, 2015

So this will be my last opus post for the rest of the semester. Just this last week we set up ssh keys on the cluster. This was a very cool thing to learn. I had always kind of heard of them before and indirectly used them; however, I did not understand how they worked. I absolutely love them now. Besides that, our cluster is full working at this point. All that I need to do for HPC0 now is do the opus. It was a good semester. Bye bye opus!