MahPIC

Introduction

MahPIC is a server that was purchased and installed in the Boyd datacenter by Jessica Kissinger and her group. Our commitment to the server is high-level administration. This node facilitates the collaboration of the University of Georgia with the project members and participating universities of Emory and Georgia Tech. We assist their existing team with their technical needs as well as acting as a proxy for their requests to EITS. It runs CentOS 6.4, has Oracle databases and is connected the zcluster over the internodal network.

In order to back up the data, the storage unit uses NFS to connect to a SunFire storage unit named thumper3. This unit uses rsync to back up its contents to an offsite SunFire named thumper4. The offsite location is the Health Sciences building located on the Health Science Campus (HSC).

Note: It is the MahPIC team's responsibility to rsync data to the /mnt/backup mount point if they want it backed up.

Jeremy DeBarry is the project manager, Vishal Nayak is the system administrator and Alan Gingle is an Oracle administrator. Each of these users has sudo and su privileges.

Access

DNS Name: mahpic.uga.edu

Login: SSH

Physical Description

The server is an HP ProLiant DL380 G7 with an attached storage array providing 6TB of storage. It's located on the Kissinger row in the back of the Boyd datacenter.

Configuration

MahPIC is a straightforward Linux installation with access to our networks. The 6TB storage array is partitioned using LVM2. These partitions are shrunk and grown and new LVM partitions are created and mounted as they request. An NFS mount point from thumper3 is mounted under /mnt/backup on the unit. mahpic uses rsync in root's crontab to copy data to the /mnt/backup partition. thumper3 does the same to thumper4 over SSH.

thumper3 and thumper4 has snapshots taken daily, weekly and monthly.

Firewall

MahPIC has made many firewall requests. When their team makes a request, we use the request form on infosec.uga.edu to grant them.

Routine Tasks

Adding an LVM partition

Note: The 6TB volume is identified as /dev/sdb1 and already has an existing VG.

1. lvcreate -L 3G -n new_lv mahpic_data_vg
2. mkfs.ext3 /dev/mahpic_data_vg/new_lv
3. blkid /dev/mahpic_data_vg/new_lv
4. (Add blkid to /etc/fstab)

Checking Backups

Note: mahpic uses SSH public-keys for password-less login to thumper3. thumper3 uses public-keys to log into thumper4.

1. On mahpic
2. (to check cron rsync) crontab -e
3. ssh thumper3
4. zfs list zpool1/mahpic
5. zfs list -t snapshots | grep mahpic
6. ssh thumper4
7. zfs list zpool1/mahpic
8. zfs list -t snapshot | grep mahpic
9. On thumper3
10. (to check cron rsync) crontab -e