Clockfort's Tech Blog

There is like, zero documentation for doing this on the Internet. No one else wants to install Gentoo in a VServer guest on a Debian Itanium2 host? Lame.

This quick overview contains many things specific to my personal setup; therefore:

• You will want to check your local gentoo mirror to see what the current ia64 tarball is.
• You will want to change the name, hostname, and network address of your vserver
• You can use whatever directories you want; the actual files will go in /var/lib/vservers/<hostname>/ , (and /etc/vservers/<hostname>/ ) and you can delete the stage3 tarball after you’re done.
• So you don’t get confused, “jolt” is the name of my debian host machine, and “coffee” is the vserver guest I am creating.

#Install the Vserver kernel and utilities if you already have not.

jolt:/space/vserver# aptitude install linux-image-vserver-mckinley util-vserver vserver-debiantools

#Reboot to boot into new kernel.

jolt:/space/vserver# reboot

#Are you running the new kernel? It should say “vserver” in there somewhere.

jolt:/space/vserver# uname -a
Linux jolt 2.6.26-2-vserver-mckinley #1 SMP Thu Nov 5 07:44:36 UTC 2009 ia64 GNU/Linux

#Get the latest Stage3 tarball from a mirror close to you.

jolt:/space/vserver/base-images/# wget http://mirrors.rit.edu/gentoo/releases/ia64/current-stage3/stage3-ia64-20091229.tar.bz2

#Build the vserver.  –context is just a unique number you set from 1-49152, non-inclusive. Everything else is relatively self explanatory.

jolt:/space/vserver/base-images/# vserver coffee build –context 1253 –hostname coffee –interface eth2:129.21.50.66/24 –initstyle gentoo -m template — -d gentoo -t /space/vserver/base-images/stage3-ia64-20091229.tar.bz2

jolt:/space/vserver/base-images/# cd /var/lib/vservers/coffee
jolt:/var/lib/vservers/coffee# cp -L /etc/resolv.conf ./etc/resolv.conf
jolt:/var/lib/vservers/coffee# chroot ./ /bin/bash
jolt / # env-update
>>> Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache…
jolt / # source /etc/profile
jolt / # export PS1=”(chroot) $PS1″
(chroot) jolt / # emerge –sync
(chroot) jolt / # eselect profile list
Available profile symlink targets:
[1] default/linux/ia64/10.0 *
[2] default/linux/ia64/10.0/desktop
[3] default/linux/ia64/10.0/developer
[4] default/linux/ia64/10.0/server
[5] hardened/linux/ia64/10.0
(chroot) jolt / # eselect profile set 4
(chroot) jolt / # cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern /etc/localtime
(chroot) jolt / # nano /etc/make.conf
(chroot) jolt / # cat /etc/make.conf
#Gentoo Itanium VServer make.conf Created: 2010-01-14 by Clockfort (devnull@remove_this_part_for_spam_reasons.csh.rit.edu)
CFLAGS=”-O2 -mtune=mckinley -pipe”
CXXFLAGS=”-O2 -pipe”
# WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly.
# Please consult http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml before changing.
CHOST=”ia64-unknown-linux-gnu”
MAKEOPTS=”-j5″

# Portage Options
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=”–ask –verbose –tree –jobs=5″
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES=”info warn error log”
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM=”save”
AUTOCLEAN=”yes”
FEATURES=”parallel-fetch userfetch collision-protect buildpkg”
PORT_LOGDIR=/var/log/portage

# Portage Sync/Download Locations
GENTOO_MIRRORS=”http://mirrors.rit.edu/gentoo http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/gentoo ftp://ftp.wallawalla.edu/pub/mirrors/ftp.gentoo.org http://lug.mtu.edu/gentoo/”
SYNC=”rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage”

# Use Flags
USE=”$USE symlink” # Kernel
USE=”$USE mmx sse sse2″ # CPU
USE=”$USE pam ssl” # Authentication
USE=”$USE bash-completion” # Completion
USE=”$USE X gtk svg qt3support” # X support
USE=”$USE xulrunner” # native browser integration
USE=”$USE jpeg png” #image support
#FEATURES=”${FEATURES} candy”

(chroot) jolt / # passwd
#Ignore the scanelf “unaligned access” error you get, it won’t hurt anyone, just slow things down a bit.
(chroot) jolt / # emerge syslog-ng
(chroot) jolt / # rc-update add syslog-ng default
#Remove reference to /proc/kmsg
(chroot) jolt / # nano /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf
(chroot) jolt / # emerge vixie-cron
(chroot) jolt / # rc-update add vixie-cron default
(chroot) jolt / # exit
jolt:/var/lib/vservers/coffee# vserver coffee start
jolt:/var/lib/vservers/coffee# vserver coffee enter
See also:
http://linux-vserver.org/Installation_on_Debian
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/vps/vserver-howto.xml
http://linux-vserver.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/

Made major progress (between the hours of 12AM and 6:30AM) this morning on getting the most recent pull of Bell Lab’s Plan 9 sources to work quite right under CSH’s Xen cluster (running Xen 3.3). Ethernet interface not currently working. That’d be nice to have. :-/

After that, though, I hope to port some house services over to a superior operating system :-)

I also got a book on 8088 assembly with which I hope to enhance the capabilities of our IBM PCJr. My roommate (Alex Grant, webmaster for CSH) started a BBS-like service for it, which is running in our room.

My friends Bob and Will are still convincing me to learn IA64 assembly and work with them porting plan9 to this platform… they may be crazy. That said, I’m on page 48 of an IA64 reference guide :-) It’s a pretty sweet architecture, really, but there are quite a few “gotchas” for assembly programmers that I could see making writing compilers and kernels hard. Ah well.

Had to start a project blog to appease Dumont, our beloved R&D director!

So, in some flash of 6AM brilliance, I decided I’ll be doing a seminar when I get back on programming different types of network architectures – i.e., traditional client-server architecture, peer to peer, multicast broadcast, etc. Sounds not so interesting, right?

So, the “flash of brilliance” part was inspired by my friend’s Scott and Angelo, as seen on Scott’s website. The idea is, I’ll give the seminar on Computer Science House, and give EVERYONE ON FLOOR some client programs to run; when my server programs touch communicate to these clients, they start the next “verse” of the song “Dueling Banjos”, all synchronized together. (i.e. A group of computers start playing the first part of the song, then it switches to another group of computers…)

Thus, in my demonstration of each architecture, attendants will be able to hear a deafening cacophony of dueling banjos, and even better, because it’s audible, they’ll be able to hear WHY some architectures are better than others for certain applications; for instance, broadcasting the server to a multicast address (two of which are available on floor) will result in the least variation in delay time, so the music will be more in-sync. They’ll hear for themselves that the peer-to-peer architecture, on the other hand, isn’t very well suited to this particular application, and results in very de-synced music in which everything is playing at once, eventually.

This will be awesome. I’ve already written the source code completely for two out of the three network architectures I want to go over, but I may want to add more architectures. The code is written in Java, because A) It’s what the freshmen know, because it’s taught in CS class, so it’ll be easier for me to explain each architecture, and B) By using Java’s audio classes (which are not very elegant at all, by the way) and compiling to Java byte-code class files, it’s very portable, meaning everyone on floor can run the application, especially important considering floor has a very high proportion of GNU/Linux and Mac OS X users, with a few misguided saps like my room-mate who run Windows.

Talking to R&D:

(09:36:57 PM) Me (AIM): for bar camp, I'm thinking I'll do a presentation on different kinds of networking client/peer architectures
(09:37:13 PM) Me (AIM): but the example programs I made are AWESOME
(09:37:18 PM) Dumont: oh?
(09:38:14 PM) Me (AIM): The example program plays "Dueling Banjos"; i.e. in one architecture, one computer plays a banjo line, then it sends a packet to the other guy who plays the guitar line, who sends a packet...
(09:38:18 PM) Me (AIM): It's awesome to see
(09:38:41 PM) Dumont: wow...
(09:38:44 PM) Me (AIM): And in the normal client/server architecture, it supports an near-infinite amount of clients connecting as either the bass or treble parts
(09:38:51 PM) Dumont: OMG
(09:38:51 PM) Me (AIM): so you end up with a roomfull of PCs dueling it out
(09:38:53 PM) Dumont: ALL OF FLOOR!
(09:38:53 PM) Me (AIM): musically
(09:38:54 PM) Me (AIM): YES
(09:38:55 PM) Dumont: ALL OF FLOOR!
(09:38:56 PM) Me (AIM): EXACTLY
(09:38:57 PM) Me (AIM): EXACTLY
(09:38:59 PM) Dumont: IT MUST HAPPEN!
(09:39:01 PM) Me (AIM): EXACTLY
(09:39:37 PM) Me (AIM): it took me FOREVER to cut up the audio in audacity
(09:39:39 PM) Me (AIM): but it was worth it
(09:39:51 PM) Dumont: that'll be awesome
(09:39:55 PM) Dumont: must do this when we return
(09:39:59 PM) Me (AIM): ^_^