CU Norlin Library Linux training

Outline of advanced session topics:

A Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation

• Minimum OS requirements:
  https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Virtualization_Host_Configuration_and_Guest_Installation_Guide/chap-Virtualization_Host_Configuration_and_Guest_Installation_Guide-System_Requirements.html
• Wrinkles added by virtualization:
  • Possible virtual network card issues (but not with current RHEL)
  • Virtual hard drives are easily expandable, so less need to take pains up front for disk sizing
  • Console video can be slow and mouse can be painful
  • If we can provide 2 Gbytes of RAM, a < 7 year old CPU, and 30+ Gbytes of disk, RHEL will be happy
• Apps are extra
  • Gather requirements from application owners (or help them in talking to the vendors)
  • How much RAM, disk, CPU is needed?
• Gather network info:
  • IP address, netmask, default gateway
  • DNS resolver config: name server IP addresses, and domain search path
  • Will this machine be using NIS/YP, LDAP, some other network based directory service? No, not here at Norlin.
  • Or just skip all that and rely on DHCP
• Create empty VM in HyperV
• Attach RHEL 6.5 DVD ISO image to VM's DVD drive
• Power it on
• Walk through installer one step at a time:
  • Point out the advanced disk options, but save details for later
• Installation done. Reboot and log in on console
• Make sure hypervisor support package is installed
• Ping my router
  • How do I find the router's IP? I got it by DHCP.
• Ping other machines on local subnet
• Ping machines on another subnet
• ping www.google.com and test our DNS setup in addition to our IP layer

A deeper look into block devices, LVM, and filesystems

• Block device? What's that?
  • An array of bytes that can be read at an arbitrary offset
  • So it's like RAM, except that reads and writes happen one block at a time instead of in 8-bit bytes, or various words of 16, 32, or 64 bits.
  • And entire block must be read or written at once (a sector on a disk drive for instance)
• What block devices are attached to my Linux VM?
  Look in /proc/partitions
• Quite a number are listed, one for each block device.
• Some commonly seen block devices:
  • SCSI hard drives (sda). These include pretty much any hard drive that uses the SCSI command set: internal SATA drives from BestBuy, FibreChannel SAN LUNs, USB thumb drives, SAS disks from your server vendor, iSCSI arrays, etc.
  • Partitions on those drives (sda#)
  • CD or DVD ROM drives (sr#)
  • Metadisk/software RAID devices (md###)
  • Hardware RAID drives (cciss/c#d#) and partitions on those (cciss/c#d#p#)
  • Device mapper (dm-#)
  • Device mapper has a number of modules. One implements LVM, another does disk encryption.
• These devices can put together in interesting ways
  • Let's have some tin foil hat paranoia.
  • Imagine a server with two hard drives
  • The physical drives are 1Tbyte SATA disks sda and sdb.
  • The first partitions of each are sda1 and sdb1. These partitions are small, 512Mbytes
  • sda1 and sdb1 are made into MD software RAID-1 mirrors, which is accessed as md127
  • A second partitions is created on each drive, sda2 and sdb2. These have the rest of the space on each drive, say 999Gbytes.
  • We're super paranoid, so these second partitions are encrypted. (cryptadm luksFormat used on /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2 choosing a well-reviewed encryption algorithm and a large key size). We'll be able to use the plain-text versions of these partitions as sda2_plain and sdb2_plain.
  • Now the sda2_plain and sdb2_plain devices partitions can be mirrored, using the MD software RAID tools again.
    mdadm --create raid1oncrypteddisks --level=raid1 /dev/mapper/sda2_plain /dev/mapper/sdb2_plain
  • The raid1oncrypteddisks device can be encrypted, choosing a different, but still well studied algorithm and a large key size)
  • The plaintext version of raid1oncrypteddisks, called something like raid1oncrypteddisks_plain
  • Which can then be used as an LVM physical volume.
  • Which makes for a segue into the Logical Volume Manager layer

LVM, the logical volume manager

• Allows the sysadmin to create, resize, and remove block devices dynamically -- no reboot needed.
• Definitions:
  • Physical volume: a disk drive (but it could also be a software mirror, or a RAM disk, or an encrypted device)
  • Physical extent: a fixed size chunk of some disk drive like device that is then allocated to an abstracted logical volume. A physical extent cannot span more than one physical volume. Sizes range from 1024 bytes and up by powers of 2.
  • Volume group: A collection of one or more physical volumes. On these physical volumes, extents may be provisioned into one or more logical volumes for use by other layers such as filesystems, swap space, virtual machine images, etc.
  • Logical volume: a collection of logical extents
  • Logical extent: a block of data that is mapped to one (or more if mirroring with LVM) physical extent somewhere inside the volume group. Logical volumes may be striped using extents from more than one physical volume if desired. The can be snapshotted, created, and deleted as needed.
• Hands on:
  • Look what block devices we have listed in /proc/partitions
  • add 2 10Gbyte thin provisioned logical disks to each of our lab VMs
  • Look at kernel message buffer (dmesg and /proc/partitions after disks have been added. Was a reboot needed to find them?
  • Decided whether to partition these new disks. GPT or MBR partition? If creating partitions, was a reboot needed?
• RedHat's documentation is quite good. See https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html-single/Logical_Volume_Manager_Administration/

​Session 1 Introductions, get acquainted with students and their skill levels Remote connections using SSH disk and filesystem management All about disks disk interfaces (direct attached and network attached) disk partitions, tools to create and manage them with Linux disk based filesystems (ext2/ext3/ext4 family and others) Logical volume manager benefits of LVM costs of LVM LVM tools introduction Session 2 configuration files How to find what you're looking for network setup network interfaces IP addressing routing DNS configuration and hosts file Advanced network (if needed) bonded network interfaces iSCSI What are initiators and targets? find available iSCSI storgae connecting your Linux system to a target Log file locations and content overview Install an RDP server on the Storehouse system ​Session 3 Maintenance RedHat support lifetime RedHat Network CU Boulder's RedHat Satellite server Best practices daily care and feeding of your Linux server regular software maintenance monitoring of system usage unstructured Q&A