The rise of trinity 3.0

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject: The rise of trinity 3.0

Well, the time has come...with failing fans and page generation times creeping up sometimes over one minute (!) it is time for an upgrade. Thanks to EAP donations it can arrive...the third incarnation of trinity:

trinity 1.0: frankenbox PC Pentium (no MMX!) 133. 64 MB ram.

trinity 1.1: original server augmented with K6-3 400 database server for a few months.

trinity 2.0: dual PII 400, 192 MB ram, 9 GB HD. now with dead fans and a penchant for shutting down on hot afternoons.

trinity 3.0: ...

The base system is a Mac mini, 1.42 GHz PPC. The lower grade system has served up www well, so it seems to be a good fit. I'll keep folk up to date in this thread. The trick is going to be figuring out how to recreate the appropriate config (which I hope to document this time as well).

ed

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 10:16 pm Post subject:

Interesting. The box came from Apple with a bent DVI->VGA adapter (easily fixed with a regular screwdriver and a can of pabst) and Panther (!). I didn't even think these boxes could run 10.3.

But cooler is that it came with 512 MB instead of the advertised 256. Score.

Now to get a real OS on it...

ed

LemonAid · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 10:20 pm Post subject:

watching with ... GREAT interest.

Philip (and HOW does a can of pabst fix a bent pin?!? Confused

)

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 10:22 pm Post subject:

LemonAid · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 10:41 pm Post subject:

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 11:03 pm Post subject:

Hmm...disklabel doesn't seem to like large hard drives. Here's hoping fdisk madness doesn't ensue...

ed

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 11:16 pm Post subject:

Yes, FWIW, a "real OS" is OpenBSD. Thus the PPC base machine...as of yet Core minis aren't supported by my OS of choice Smile

ed

/theo 2.0?

LemonAid · Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 12:14 am Post subject:

DARN, Did you read my mind about "a real OS"? Shocked

I KNEW you were good, but that is ... AMAZING! Please be careful and don't get your PPC and Intel mixed up. Wink

Philip (NeoOffice fora is more fun than reading marketing rants! Twisted Evil

)

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 12:46 am Post subject:

If nothing else I can definitely say that even after half a case of PBR I shall never confuse any computer with a Mac mini Very Happy

Right now OBSD 3.9 is installing which will take some time. After that it's config time (mod_dosevasive, gd, rewrite engine, mysql, etc.), smoke testing, and then the grand switch. really, trinity's not so bad since the server has never hosted virtual domains of any sort and it's never lowered children into open manholes...

ed

/left a mark
//listen there you lesbian left-handed midget albino

LemonAid · Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 12:57 am Post subject:

Philip (is NOT really here and Ed it talking to ... himself?!? Rolling Eyes

)

Samwise · Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 5:19 am Post subject:

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 8:58 am Post subject:

Nope, the rest of the box seems fine. Odd...I completely forgot that the originals had 10.3. I thought they totally came after Tiger.

Regardless, yes, trinity is presently running on some "slow" hardware with its dual P2-400s. The machine keeps up OK normally, but the page generation times are getting slow, especially during the CVS sync times (3AMPST/3PMPST) where it can balloon to over a minute Sad

ed

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 11:08 am Post subject:

OK, next bit of random trivia:

At the disk partitioning step make sure to add in a "b" command to expand the partition table to the entire disk.

3.9 seems to have problems installing its bootloader, though.

FWIW, I do credit OpenBSD with why trinity is and generally has always been so fast. Not only is it audited more for security, but also the services are extremely pared down. Unlike other BSDs and even OS X at times, it's possible to know exactly what every running process on an OpenBSD system is responsible for Smile

No extraneous things = more processing power for PHP!!

ed

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2006 11:29 pm Post subject:

After some wrangling, it seems that the OpenBSD macppc 3.9 installer can't properly initialize the MBR boot partition properly. After not being able to figure out how to map it, apparently the solution is to do a minimal install of OpenBSD 3.8 (which does properly initialize the MBR boot partition and put on the bootloader) and then do an upgrade to 3.9. We'll see if this results in a bootable system.

ed

OPENSTEP · Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 3:38 pm Post subject:

OK, the new machine is now installed and running the server. The biggest difference you should notice is performance during high loads (e.g. the anoncvs sync"). Now instead of 45 seconds per page the response is more like 2 sec in my testing Smile

For posterity (and so I remember next time...) here's the additional work that had to be done after installing OpenBSD on the box:

- install the following: emacs (as I'm a tool), mysql, php4, php4-gd, gd library (used OpenBSD 3.8 ports), php4-mysql, mod-perl
- enable ntpd with -s to reset time flag from the NTP pool on startup
- adjust open file limits for the larger database (change open files to 2048 in /etc/login.conf for daemons, change open files option to mysqld-safe to 2048, increase number of file descriptors with sysctl -w kern.maxfiles)
- install mod_dosevasive with apxs
- move in all configuration contents of the /var/www directory, contents of htdocs, icons/ subdir, apache configuration in conf and cvsweb, cvsweb cgi-bin script
- copy in all appropriate libraries and directory structure into /var/www to allow php to run chrooted
- add cvsd user account and public keys for anoncvs cvs sync
- disable password login for sshd
- create appropriate database and database user
- synchronize database from last backup
- synchronize anonymous CVS
- configure machine to serve up CVS partition on local nfs and local loopback mount into /var/www for access to chrooted apache
- add crontab for doing nightly database backup

ed