What I Learned…
…during the last week of last year.
Due to some illnesses in our support staff, I ended doing a big upgrade job short-handed. This is what I learned:
- When Autodesk support say they have shortened support hours, it also meant that they are quite understaffed, which reflected in both the reply times, and even the quality of some answers
- The Lustre upgrade scripts couldn’t handle the straight upgrade to 2009SP2 from 2007. Several things got broken on the way, like the Incinerator Manager website, which could no longer start or stop the nodes.
- The Lustre/Incinerator licensing scheme is quite difficult to understand at times, and you have to make sure your temporary license contains licenses for the nodes as well.
- It is hard to test systems you have no idea of how to use
- Working 17 hours shifts is not fun
- A good remote desktop & SSH remote connection to the office is very nice at times
- Always upgrade Autodesk-workstations from the local screen, else you will miss out on some essential settings, and get no warning
- writing bash scripts would be a nice skill to have, thanks Filipp
- Lustre 2009 is a lot more picky about settings. We used use our SAN with the frames mounted directly from workstation-SAN-mount, but in 2009 we need to use the frames over Infiniband from the Frameserver in order to get the nodes to work