Project:Infrastructure/Developer Machines/hppa

hppa Admin Notes
These are various notes mainly targeted at people administrating Gentoo dev machines, although most things are probably generally useful. These are not general "how do I administrate a Gentoo box" notes.

Hostnames
These are the current systems we have available. See machine specific notes at bottom for more details.

Console Access
You connect to the serial console over ssh. If your account doesn't have access, talk to infra@ to get your keys on there. ssh -p 3003 -l $USER console1.gentoo.osuosl.org

You can use this to:
 * Interact with the early firmware (e.g. to select recovery kernel)
 * Log in directly to recover
 * Send magic sysrq requests to try and recover the box (e.g. when ssh is dead)

Common PDC Commands
If you reboot into the PDC (the early firmware), you have some options to recover manually:


 * Hit any key right after power on (it'll prompt you) to halt the process and interact with PDC directly.
 * Type  to boot the alternative media (usually a livecd).
 * Type  to launch PALO (the bootloader), and then type   when asked whether to interact with the IPL (Initial Program Loader).

Common PALO Commands
PALO will display the list of partitions first, and then show the current command line. Those partition numbers are used when constructing the path to the kernel. So means load the file  from the 2nd partition. When recovery kernels are enabled, then partition is the recovery partition.

To boot a known good kernel, try changing the kernel path to the recovery kernel at.

To boot a recovery shell, try changing the last command line option (usually ) to the rescue shell like.

Magic Sysrq
In order to use magic sysrq, you'll need to send a break command followed by the request. To send a break, you'll need to use the ssh escape sequence, and you'll have to remember to double escape the character (if you're not sshing directly to the console server).

Try typing  (if connected directly) or   (if sshing via another system).

If it worked, you should see the one line of help text like: SysRq : HELP : loglevel(0-9) reboot(b) crash(c) terminate-all-tasks(e) memory-full-oom-kill(f) kill-all-tasks(i) thaw-filesystems(j) sak(k) show-memory-usage(m) nice-all-RT-tasks(n) poweroff(o) show-registers(p) show-all-timers(q) unraw(r) sync(s) show-task-states(t) unmount(u) show-blocked-tasks(w)

Kernel Management
hppa systems use the palo tool from the package to manage booting of kernels. Things to remember:


 * Make updates to.
 * Run  whenever  is changed or kernels referred to by the config file are updated (failure to do so will break booting).
 * The bootable linux kernel is created at (e.g. under ).
 * The  shortcut usually does not do the right thing under hppa.

/etc/palo.conf
--commandline=2/vmlinux root=/dev/sda3 panic=3 --init-partitioned=/dev/sda

--recoverykernel=/boot/vmlinux.ok

hake

 * Contact: support@osuosl.org
 * IPv4: 140.211.166.169; netmask 255.255.255.224; gateway 140.211.166.161
 * IPv6: 2001:470:ea4a:1:230:6eff:fe2b:c8d4/64; gateway 2001:470:ea4a:1::1/64
 * System: C3600
 * Memory: 3G
 * CPU: PA8600 552MHz
 * Disks: 50GB