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Profile David Ball
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Message 1296 - Posted 6 Nov 2006 23:59:33 UTC

You can look at the " Linux Users " thread under "Number Crunching" for posts by me describing the history of things that had to be tried/changed to get to this point. I thought maybe I should start another thread since that one was getting so long and included working on problems from more than one user / distro mixed together. Some of my posts in that thread are for helping another user and don't pertain to the RHEL3 problem.

The machine is setup for text only both on the console and through ssh. I've now upgraded the boinc client from 5.2.13 to 5.4.9 on the RedHat RHEL3 Machine and my one WU per day still fails. It only gets one per day and returns the result within a few hours.

I'm running the BOINC core client as a service and I've tracked down several places in RedHat RHEL3 where some limits are set for processes during startup, based on the user it is running as. I've now modified every one of those I could track down and modified the service startup code in /etc/init.d/boinc. The following files had to be modified.

/etc/profile
/etc/bashrc
/etc/profile.d/limits.sh
/etc/profile.d/limits.csh
The ~/.bashrc doesn't have a ulimit command in it since it executes /etc/bashrc.

You have to modify PAM to use limits.conf, like in the 2.6.x kernels. I went that route and didn't have any luck, but I don't recall if I set the stack to unlimited or just to a huge size.

Note: I pulled the source of the stable boinc client from CVS and found that when it starts a process, it does a fork and then the forked thread does an execv() to start the new program on Linux.

I verified that the BOINC core client was running with ulimit -s unlimited (changed /etc/init.d/boinc to do an su command and run "ulimit -a" as the boinc user just before it started the client) and it still failed after 400 - 800 seconds.

I noticed that the time when it fails on that machine was about 400 CPU seconds for the old WUs (work units) and about 800 CPU seconds for the new WUs, which you had increased the size on. What does the WU do at the beginning that is size related and what does it do immediately after that? Could this be about the time the C wrapper program starts the Fortran program? The machine is a Celeron 2.4 with 2 GB RAM and 2 GB swap. the "free" command shows that after adjusting for RAM used for caching, less than 512 MB is actually used for programs and the OS.

Is the WU trying to change the stack limit? I have noticed that RHEL3 drops the lcap privileges for the new program when you do an SU. I've also noticed that even though the program is running as user boinc, it still has the environment set to say the init file for bash (which is also sh) is /root/.bashrc, which the boinc user does not have access privilege to.

Thanks,

-- David

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Message 1300 - Posted 7 Nov 2006 1:34:33 UTC

>> David, whilst I am not all that Linux savvy and at this stage do any programming checks as you are, I was just wondering what the main difference is between RHEL and Fedora Core?
As they are both produced by Red Hat would not most functionality be similar?
I am using Fedora Core 3 and have been able to get it goingwith just the modifications to "run_manager' and "run_client".
I am using AMD processors but that should not make too much difference.
I had to modify 'run_client' as well due to my dual cores not taking notice of the 'run_manager' 'ulimit' change. Even then I had to reboot for the changes to take effect, but all now working.
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Message 1302 - Posted 7 Nov 2006 4:08:05 UTC - in response to Message ID 1300 .

>> David, whilst I am not all that Linux savvy and at this stage do any programming checks as you are, I was just wondering what the main difference is between RHEL and Fedora Core?


RHEL is their enterprise product. RHEL3 is based on a Linux 2.4.x version, but RedHat have back ported some 2.6.x features and added others of their own. They release versions about every 1.5 years (RHEL4 is out and RHEL5 is coming soon) and they release updates for 5 years. It's meant to be a stable, secure, certified version. My machine also has had a bunch of 3rd party security programs added, although it's not really worth breaking into.

RHEL is the product that brings in the money for RedHat. It's also the version that they put through various software certification programs such as the government security rating program. In addition to having the OS put through other peoples certification programs, they have a certification program themselves where they certify applications such as major enterprise software (none of which is on my system) to run under RHEL.

BTW, If I understand correctly, CentOS is basically built from the GPL source rpm's of RHEL with the RedHat branding and artwork removed, and some other things added.


As they are both produced by Red Hat would not most functionality be similar?
I am using Fedora Core 3 and have been able to get it going with just the modifications to "run_manager' and "run_client".
I am using AMD processors but that should not make too much difference.
I had to modify 'run_client' as well due to my dual cores not taking notice of the 'run_manager' 'ulimit' change. Even then I had to reboot for the changes to take effect, but all now working.


I have Docking@Home working on a different machine with FC3. The Fedora Project is a Red Hat sponsored and community supported open source project. Afaik, Fedora Core releases are a testbed for features that they would like to put in the next RHEL version. IIRC, Fedora has a shorter release cycle. FC3 is already considered legacy software and FC6 is out.

-- David

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Message 1303 - Posted 7 Nov 2006 5:08:35 UTC - in response to Message ID 1302 .

>> David, whilst I am not all that Linux savvy and at this stage do any programming checks as you are, I was just wondering what the main difference is between RHEL and Fedora Core?


RHEL is their enterprise product. RHEL3 is based on a Linux 2.4.x version, but RedHat have back ported some 2.6.x features and added others of their own. They release versions about every 1.5 years (RHEL4 is out and RHEL5 is coming soon) and they release updates for 5 years. It's meant to be a stable, secure, certified version. My machine also has had a bunch of 3rd party security programs added, although it's not really worth breaking into.

RHEL is the product that brings in the money for RedHat. It's also the version that they put through various software certification programs such as the government security rating program. In addition to having the OS put through other peoples certification programs, they have a certification program themselves where they certify applications such as major enterprise software (none of which is on my system) to run under RHEL.

BTW, If I understand correctly, CentOS is basically built from the GPL source rpm's of RHEL with the RedHat branding and artwork removed, and some other things added.


As they are both produced by Red Hat would not most functionality be similar?
I am using Fedora Core 3 and have been able to get it going with just the modifications to "run_manager' and "run_client".
I am using AMD processors but that should not make too much difference.
I had to modify 'run_client' as well due to my dual cores not taking notice of the 'run_manager' 'ulimit' change. Even then I had to reboot for the changes to take effect, but all now working.


I have Docking@Home working on a different machine with FC3. The Fedora Project is a Red Hat sponsored and community supported open source project. Afaik, Fedora Core releases are a testbed for features that they would like to put in the next RHEL version. IIRC, Fedora has a shorter release cycle. FC3 is already considered legacy software and FC6 is out.

-- David




Thanks for the infomation David, best of luck with RHEL3, as I sure can't help you, unfortunately.
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Message 1315 - Posted 8 Nov 2006 2:58:17 UTC

Seriously speaking, since you use the system in text only mode, why are you using RHEL? And what do those security processes do? Is your system hardened?
Don't you like debian?

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Message 1317 - Posted 8 Nov 2006 13:12:58 UTC - in response to Message ID 1315 .

Seriously speaking, since you use the system in text only mode, why are you using RHEL? And what do those security processes do? Is your system hardened?
Don't you like debian?


It's a web server,located in a datacenter. It has everything from APF (firewall) that's been customized, to BFD (Brute Force Protection) to multiple IDS systems, multiple rootkit scanners, PHP hardening, Apache hardening, virus scanners, plus a bunch of other stuff. It's about 97% idle most of the time, so it might as well run BOINC. It mainly runs a site that provides information on authors and has book reviews. It refers people to Amazon for buying them. It's all static html and there's nothing on the server worth stealing like personal info or financial data. In fact, you could just get the data off of it by downloading all the pages on the website. Of course, there are about 20000 of them :-) The html pages are produced from a database on an offline machine and uploaded as a tar.gz file that's currently about 21 MegaBytes. Then it's unzipped and un-tared on the server.

I've never tried Debian. It's not offered much for web servers here in the US, and when it is, the datacenter often will not support it.

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Message 1326 - Posted 9 Nov 2006 3:15:48 UTC - in response to Message ID 1317 .
Last modified: 9 Nov 2006 3:16:19 UTC

I've never tried Debian. It's not offered much for web servers here in the US, and when it is, the datacenter often will not support it.


I understand, when in your situation it's not easy to change if you manage to build a functional and working system. Maybe it's better if you don't change at all :)

Message boards : Unix/Linux : Redhat RHEL3 problems

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