HP Tech Conference 2008

Greening the Data Centre (Anand Akela)

Integrity Power Calculator uses your hardware actual configuration (eg. amount of RAM, speed of CPUs etc) to estimate power consumption.
Once you've measured the actual power you can use Power Regulator to cap power usage to measured peak consumption or even measured average consumption.
I find it ironic that the speaker says you can leverage all the saved power capacity to install more servers. I'm not sure how that's "greener" :-)

NFS Performance Comparison (Dave Olker)

Filebench benchmark tool which allows customisation of the type of workload
Performance comparisons for NFS + Kerberos: krb5 isn't too expensive but krb5i and krb5p are hugely expensive in theory ... however in the real world you typically get bottlenecked on disk
TCP Segmentation Offload means that the OS sends 32k chunks of data to the NIC and then NIC itself breaks things up into MTU sized packets.
NFSv3 + Kerberos will also replace the NFS RPC mechanism and thus work around the 16 group limitation. Sweet!
They are seeing lots of customers using NFSv4 on HPUX, main driver is that it's easier to firewall NFSv4 due to its simpler layout of ports. Still not much traction with Linux that they are aware of.

Collectl: A Single Tool for all Your Linux Performance Monitoring Needs (Mark Seger)

Homepage is at: http://collectl.sourceforge.net/
Main features are efficient use of screen real estate, can monitor on sub-second intervals, interactive or record for future playback, has access to a wide range of data sources.
It can output GNUplot formatted data for easy graphing (good for Excel as well)
As of kernel 2.6.20 you can enable (CONFIG_TASKSTATS) real time per-process IO statistics (look in /proc/<pid>/io)
CMU (Cluster Monitoring Utility) has an interesting way of displaying graphs for data about a whole cluster.
colplot is a web front end for building GNUplot graphs from collectl data (it is not open source but can be made available to HP customers)

Mondo Rescue: A GPL Disaster Recovery Solution for Linux (Bruno Comec)

Home page is at: http://trac.mondorescue.org/
Creates a bootable ISO image (from a compressed afio stream) of the running Linux server including the currently running kernel and modules.
Can save disk structure and Proliant hardware specific information.
Can create an image from a live system.
Can change filesystem type, layout or software RAID configuration when you restore (to Proliant hardware).
PXE support means that you can dump your images to a central location and then serve them out to servers via network boot.
List of HP supported open source projects: http://opensource.hp.com/opensource_projects.html

Built-in Linux Management and Deployment Tools for Proliant (Jonathan Anderson)

SSST allows you to PXE boot, configure your hardware based on a template, configure your RAID, configure the iLO and even update all firmware.
PSP (Proliant Support Package) is a bundled set of drivers, firmware and monitoring agents which have all been tested to work together.
SSST is a cut down version of SLES9, the initrd.img is updated with all Proliant drivers. Handy!
SSST will allow you to use a USB drive instead of PXE for the boot environment.
Nice idea to setup PXE boot option to harvest the settings of a "gold server" and write it to a network location
Utility dmidecode cross vendor tool for scanning the BIOS to determine hardware configuration, especially useful because every vendor has different tools for writing to BIOS.
CONREP captures BIOS configuration to an XML file, allows the user to change it, and then write the new configuration back to the BIOS. TIP: edit the XML file to only contain the differences from default, this vastly speeds up the process of writing the configuration back to the hardware.
CPQACUXE - allows you to pre-configure the RAID configuration
HPONCFG - allows initial configuration of RILOE II, iLO and iLO2 from the host OS, without having to reboot
CPQLOCFG or locfg.pl are intended for network administration of iLO's.
Remote (Virtual) Serial Console can be accessed by telnet or SSH and provides access to POST, OS boot loader and OS itself (each has to be individually configured). Supports loading keys for passwordless SSH via the web GUI or the mxagentconfig utility.
RIBCL - scripting language for pushing out changes to iLOs (and OAs?)
Solution Demo Portal for online demonstrations of HP solutions
Smart Components for updating ROM Flash locally, uses CPXXXXXX.scexe tools, requires the hpasm daemon to be running
Example Perl scripts for remote managing iLOs http://www.hp.com/servers/lights-out (in Best Practices section), based around the locfg.pl command

Configure Grub (or Lilo) to dump it's data out the virtual serial console:

serial -unit=0 =speed=115200
terminal -timeout=10 serial console
... <snip> ...
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-4smp ro root=/dev/sda9 console=tty= console=ttyS0,115200

From the OA you can get a console window on any of the attached iLOs:
```
CONNECT SERVER {SERIAL} <bay number>
```
HPONCFG can connect to the OA and push out HPONCFG commands to iLOs. Interestingly HPONCFG can also download a RIBCL script from a URL (remember that the RIBCL command has the user/pass required for making changes to the iLO so security is important).
```
HPONCFG [ ALL | <bay number> ] <from_url>
```
Insight Online Diagnostics will allow you to diff a machine's current hardware and software configuration to a previous state or the state of another machine (requires hpasm and hpsmh).
If you don't want to install all the HP driver crap, the two most useful ones are the health agent (hpasm) and the iLO interface driver (hpilo, was hprsm). Both hpasm and hpilo run in user space.
OAs and iLOs can be configured to authenticate users via LDAP (and require group membership), it's advisable to keep a local administration user.

Laptop Management and Security in the Classroom (Andy Avery)

Homepage is at: http://www.absolute.com/
High end enterprise product is Computrace, consumer application is LoJack (I wondered what had happened to the source code)
Installs a hidden daemon which checks in with an online server to see if it's been reported as stolen by the owner. If it has been, it gathers data and reports back.
Runs on Mac and Windows and they have plans for Linux
On Windows they have worked with all the major hardware vendors (HP, Dell etc) to get a shim put in the BIOS. The shim is deactivated by default but can be enabled by an administrator. Once it's enabled it installs the software. Basically it's a BIOS and boot sector resident virus.
They say that roughly 70% of all stolen laptop's show up on the internet within 30 days. Of those laptops which show up they recover three out of four of them.
They offer a guarantee of recovery, if you haven't got your laptop back within 60 days they'll pay up to $1000 to you.
They also use their infrastructure to provide asset tracking for compliance and licensing.

All and all a pretty neat product, I'm off to get my free copy from their booth. ;-)