CSCI 372 Computer Computer System Administration — 10 February

I promise!

I will have another homework by Thursday. Except some progress on the course topics.

A quote heard an yesterday’s lunch from a former IBMer

The script wars are over. Python won.

Virtual machines

Remember the waffle principle: Throw away the first one. It applies to almost every software and hardware implementation.

The disks on virtual machines we are installed last week are just not big enough and they have no free space for our experimentations. I’d like for you to make the second waffle, but this time with the following parameters.

That will leave about 4 GB of free space for experimentation. Preferably use a Ubuntu-like distribution. I’ve gotten Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora and Win 3.1 (whoopie) virtual machines on my home computer.

Another quote from the ex-IBM guy, when I said our virtual machines seemed slow.

You must have done something wrong.

I need to get this guy in for a guest lecture.

Partitions

On Linux, fdisk and fdisk and parted, handle this.

Let’s try this out on our Pi systems. Here’s some commands I typed. The rebooting is probably excessive.

df
sudo /sbin/fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
Deleted the second partition
Created new second partition, 8G in size with same starting location
sudo /sbin/fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
df
sudo /sbin/shutdown -r now
df
sudo /sbin/fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
df
sudo /sbin/shutdown -r now
df
sudo raspi-config
sudo /sbin/shutdown -r now
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

A look at local and logical partioning while you wait

The workstations have four partitions. Two are kept from the initial cofiguration. One is for /boot. One is for logical volumes: See Wikipedia or Linux Journal for more information.

In Ubuntu, this is not easy to do at installation. We boot into the “live” system and create the logical volumes. Then we reboot and install.

Server configuration is similar but uses RAID 1 on its disks.

Other almost-forgotten implementations

Is the Pi baked?

Try to create a file system for home directories.

Trying LVM?

Why not!

Here’s what I typed. You will need to change this a bit.

Adding a user

Change the password for the pi account and create accounts for yourself and good friends.