Yellow Diamond
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Intel NUC11PAHi5
Setting Up Diamond

Jim Carter, 2021-11-18

Contents

In the Box

Check the box contents and record serial numbers. Try to get the Ethernet MAC address so it can be registered with the firewall. Recent (2017) NUCs have the MAC address and the serial number on a sticker on the bottom of the machine and also on the box.

What's in the box:

Setup Outline

BIOS Update

As delivered, the machine has BIOS version 0040 dated 2021-04-14. Not too old, but I should check for recent updates. How to obtain the latest BIOS version:

BIOS Setup

Partition the Disc

At this point there are three ways to proceed:

Partition table on old Diamond:

Nbr Size Role Fsys Label
1 1049kB BIOS boot --
2 38.8MB EFI fat16
3 23.1GB Root ext4
4 23.1GB Home ext4
5 8587MB Swap linux-swap(v1)
6 52.0GB Old VM #1 --
7 55.4GB Old VM #2 --
8 338GB Extra ext4

Orion's disc: /dev/nvme0n1 Silicon Motion SM2263EN/SM2263XT SSD Controller, 238.47GiB, 250.0Gb, can't tell the actual vendor's name but it's in Guangdong, CN.

Partition table on Orion:

Nbr Size Role Fsys Label
1 1 MiB BIOS boot None None
2 40 MiB EFI FAT16 EFI-11
3 20 GiB Root Ext4 ROOT-11
4 32 GiB Home Ext4 HOME-11
5 16 GiB Swap linux-swap(v1) SWAP-11
6 170 GiB Extra Ext4 S1-11

The Yast2 partitioner populates /etc/fstab (on the rescue system) with lines for the mountable partitions created. It persists across reboots; there's a copy-on-write overlay area. Mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 (use /dev/disk/by-label/ROOT-11) on /mnt. Copy /etc/fstab to /mnt/etc/fstab-orion . Unmount the partition.

Copy Diamond to Orion

The goal at this point is to copy stuff from Diamond to Orion's disc. A few preliminary steps were needed.

It got into a weird state. For reasons unknown, the live CD user linux (no password) could not log in; logs suggest that it did log in but exited immediately. I'm continuing as root on tty1.

It has a correct /etc/resolv.conf, generated by netconfig, probably from DHCP options that it was given. ssh jimc@diamond uname -a works (password required).

For easier copying I will give root@orion a key agent with jimc's secret key. It will get this key by:
rsync -a jimc@diamond:~/.ssh/ ~/ .ssh/ (which already exists).
eval $(ssh_agent)
ssh-add /root/.ssh/id_rsa (give password)
ssh diamond uname -a (works, no password needed)

Command lines to suck a filesystem: /boot/EFI, home and s1 are mounted on their proper mount points, but not root, of course, so put it on /mnt. But I'll first do EFI because it's very small Guess what, Diamond, Jacinth, Iris don't have EFI booting, only Xena does. Get it from Xena. Another gotcha: rsync will set the owner and group to the numeric values in the rescue disc's /etc/passwd and /etc/group for their names, which differ from what CouchNet is enforcing, leading to things not working. Head this off with the --numeric-ids option.
mount /dev/disk/by-label/ROOT-11 /mnt
rsync -a --one-file-system --numeric-ids --exclude lost+found xena:/boot/efi/ /boot/efi/
rsync -a --one-file-system --numeric-ids --exclude lost+found diamond:/ /mnt/
rsync -a --one-file-system --numeric-ids --exclude lost+found diamond:/home/ /home/

Seems to have arrived in good order, cross fingers. Root had close to 10.0Gb. If it saturates MOCA (100Mbit/sec) it would take 600sec (10min). Actual 19min, no error messages. /home has similar size and speed. I'm not copying /s1; it's all ancient special backups and ancient virtual machine images. But remember to re-create /s1/scr [done].

  • After copying content I need to change some items to stop being Diamond and start being Orion. This is still on the rescue disc.

    Boot New Disc, Checkout and Fix

    Initial problems with booting:

    checkout.sh discrepancies:

    Rebooted, re-ran the test.

  • The daily report had a bunch of permission and ownership issues. This was already seen for /var/lib/lightdm/.Xauthority (preventing the display-manager from starting, see above). I'm beginning to suspect this scenario: rsync was used to import Diamond's files to Orion. For owners and groups it sends the alphabetic names from Diamond (and numeric), and Orion looks up the name in /etc/passwd or /etc/group, and uses the resulting numbers in the file's inode. This is /etc/passwd or /etc/group on the rescue disc, not the CouchNet values, producing these error reports. So I'm going to re-do the transfers.
    rsync -a -O --one-file-system --numeric-ids --exclude lost+found diamond:/home/ /home/
    And similarly for / (root) and /boot/efi . But I'm going to have to be cautious, to avoid overwriting files whose content is supposed to be different on Orion.

    Subsystem Checkout and Testing

    These are discrepancies encountered when doing the tests listed in subsystem.shtml.

    Speed Measurements

    Speed test on Jimc's benchmark. Columns in the output:

    The test was run 3 times and the last one is reported. Actually the test is designed to be reasonably immune to buffer cache effects and scores vary only about 3% between repetitions. Numbers are in kbytes/sec.

    SHA512 SHA512*cores Disc read Composite Machine
    120848 241696 12003 81531 NUC5i5RYH
    200479 400958 4964 127781 NUC7i5BNH
    346151 1384604 84795 345279 NUC11PAHi5
    Yellow Diamond
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