The New "pc3000" Nodes

Contents


Machines and Interfaces

The new "pc3000" machines are Dell PowerEdge 2850s with a single 3GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and 2 10,000 RPM 146GB SCSI disks. Each has 4 available Gigabit experimental net interfaces, however due to lack of Gb switch ports, not all are usable at Gb speeds. Instead, they are a mix of 100Mb and 1Gb as follows:

# of Machines	Gb ports	100Mb ports	Machine names
40		4		0		pc201-pc240
20		3		1		pc241-pc260
40		2		2		pc281-pc320
60		1		3		pc261-pc280, pc321-pc360
Note that all 160 machines have at least 1 Gb interface and all can be used for 100Mb as well.

There is also a 5th Gb interface on each machine, that is used to pairwise connect adjacent machines. For example, pc201 is connected directly to pc202 via a cross over cable. These interfaces are not yet available, pending further support in the resource mapper.

All machines have serial console lines accessible from users.emulab.net via the "console" command or remotely via the tiptunnel interface.

Images and Kernel Support

Currently, the Emulab standard FreeBSD (FBSD410-STD, FBSD54-STD), Linux (RHL90-STD, FC4-STD, "legacy" RHL73-STD), and Windows (WINXP-UPDATE-pc3000, WINXP-SP{0,1,2}-pc3000) images will run on the new machines.

If you have built custom images based on our standard images before Sept 2 2005, they will likely not work on the new machines due to a lack of the correct disk driver. You will either need to re-customize based on the current images or modify your existing image to add the correct SCSI driver. For BSD, add the following to your kernel config file:

  device          mpt
For Linux, add the following to your .config:
  CONFIG_FUSION=y
  CONFIG_FUSION_BOOT=y
  CONFIG_FUSION_MAX_SGE=40
  CONFIG_FUSION_ISENSE=m
NOTE: The default Pro/1000 ethernet driver (e1000) included in the RedHat 9.0 kernel sources does not work on the pc3000s. This includes the emulab-patched RHL90 source tree! When creating a custom RH9-era kernel, you must build and install an updated version of the e1000 driver module. You can get it here: /share/linux/e1000-5.5.4.tar.gz . Please read the README inside this tarball for build/install instructions.

For Windows you will need to re-customize based on our current -pc3000 images.

Caveats