How To: Guides for users and Maryland T3 admins.

Help: Links and emails for further info.

Configuration: technical layout of the cluster, primarily for admins.

Log: Has been moved to a Google page, accessible only to admins.

Admin How-To Guide

This guide is meant for UMD admins and as a thoroughly documented single use case of a USCMS Tier 3 site. It is based off our cluster configuration and hardware, documented here. It actually is 99% out of date as of 2015 and will be removed and replaced shortly. ADMINS of hepcms: please consult our private Google pages for documentation.

We do not call out where you might need to change your syntax, so if you are a non-UMD sysadmin, we recommend you follow the guides linked at the beginning of each set of instructions and reference our guide to see the choices we made. Warning: Never ever blindly follow instructions on this or any other installation guide. Some choices are optional, some commands are meant to be run on different machines, some are only valid for a first-time installation and will not be valid for a kickstart or re-install.

Dependencies are provided at the beginning of every set of instructions, although they are listed below in the recommended installation order.

General General system administration, relevant especially for Rocks. Install Rocks & Scientific Linux 5, modify Rocks Kickstarts and create appliances. Manage users, update RPMs, configure Kerberos, set up garbage collection. Install, configure, and run Condor and Hadoop.
Hardware Primarily for Dell hardware, except for formatting and mounting the disk array. How to update Dell firmware and monitor with Dell Open Manage Server Administrator.
CMSSW Install CMS software by hand or via OSG.
CRAB Install CRAB by hand. Installation of CRAB via Rocks Kickstart is outlined in the general section.
OSG Install, configure, and run Open Science Grid with combined compute and storage element using BeStMan-Gateway with a Hadoop filesystem. Updated for OSG Release3
PhEDEx Install, configure, run, and commission links for PhEDEx.
Recovery Recovery from reboots and reinstalls. Primarily relevant only for UMD sysadmins, though some details are relevant for Rocks in general.
Errors Log of encountered problems and solutions.

Instructions are not necessarily updated every time we install a new software release (Major rewrite being implemented July-August 2013). If links have expired, any errors are found, or some points are unclear, please notify the System administrators.

Last edited September 10, 2015

In December 2009, we updated to Scientific Linux 5. We have kept an archived copy of the admin guide for Scientific Linux 4.