ATi Rage 128 on Powermac G4s

We're using some old Powermac G4s as our Gateway machines for both our old and new clusters.  The issue with these machines is that they have an ATi Rage 128 card in them, and they are notoriously finicky in Linux.  I found this site helped tremendously:
http://www.jonh.net/lppcfom-serve/cache/1043.html

Our final yaboot start?

linux video=aty128fb:vmode:20,cmode:32

Failure to do this will result in the monitor shutting off shortly after boot.

Repairs

A Sun technician came in the other day to fix some of our x2100s with issues, and he'll be coming back 'soon' as well (hopefully today).  One of the units was fixed by replacing the power supply, while the others need some more work (hence the two visits).  This and the upcoming beowulf conference next week (which my research partner, professor, and I are putting on) are sucking up all of my time . . .

Useful tool for convering an IP to hex

via the command line:

$ gethostip whateveripyouwant

Update data dir

To update the data directory on all of the nodes, do something like this as the user 'wolf':

mpirun -np 4 -host wolf002,wolf003,wolf004,wolf005 update-data-dir

and that should sync things up, which is useful after running mpiformatdb

SystemImager Issues with non-i386 systems

Our new Sun Fire x2100 servers show up as something other than i386 (for obvious reasons; they are 64 bit machines, so probably show up as x86_64 or something) to some of SystemInstaller's scripts.  The problem with this is that /usr/sbin/si_prepareclient will use sfdisk on i386 systems, and parted on everything else.

So, when running si_prepareclient, parted is used, which causes some errors that, in the end, make imaging not work.  The fix is simple (assuming you're using v3.6.3 of SystemImager):

1.  emacs /usr/sbin/si_prepareclient
2.  Go to line 673, right after this code:

        my $arch = get_arch();
        if($arch eq "i386") {
                $preferred_tool = 'sfdisk';
        }

and add this code:

        # Ben Landsteiner's addition
        $preferred_tool = 'sfdisk';

All this does is force si_prepareclient to use sfdisk.  After that, imaging our x2100 servers worked just fine.

ATLAS Compile

When compiling ATLAS, do NOT use the -jN flag, as it will cause compiling to fail.

Helpful time setting command

Command to set the time of an IPMI card:
DATE=`date "+%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S"`; ipmitool -H 10.0.1.1 -U Admin sel time set "${DATE}"

where 10.0.1.1 is the IP of the card in question.  There's probably a more elegant method, but this works for now.