Rama upgrade

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Rama needs upgrading to a supported operating system. SLES10 looks like a good choice as it will last for the rest of the machine's natural life.

Things that will change:

  • The very oldest compilers will be dropped
  • The ancient OpenPBS queueing system will be replaced with shiny new Torque (it'll look exactly the same to users, but work lots better behind the scenes)
  • environment modules will be made sane and compulsory
  • queue names rationalised
  • node names rationalised in Torque
  • /var will be made a reasonable size
  • maybe we'll get bigger disks and so more space
  • /users will become /home (but I'll make a symlink)

Things to worry about:

  • support for SCSI controller - looks like the dpt_i2o module is standard so unlikely to be a problem. Might be a plan to boot the thing off the SLES10 CD before mucking about with the RAID though, just to be sure.
  • Will the system support bigger disks? Streamline are kindly investigating.
  • I assume the nodes PXE boot

Things to do:

  • get my hands on the management software for the RAID controller.
Although it is starting to look like it is not downloadable for Linux.