[1165] in athena10
Re: fixes for usb, matlab, and mathematica for cluster machines
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Wed Feb 18 10:43:28 2009
Cc: debathena@mit.edu
Message-Id: <39BB7BEE-64A7-4535-9808-F4352A9006FF@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <200902180411.n1I4BsHI022947@pothole.mit.edu>
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Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:42:28 -0500
I tested this, and it appears to mostly work. I can use removable
deices and run MATLAB and Mathematica.
I did notice some weirdness WRT removable devices, however:
When I insert a flash drive, it shows up on the Desktop and in a new
Nautilus window. When I click the "Eject" icon next to the volume
name in the "Places" sidebar, it unmounts it, but the icon does not
disappear from the Desktop or "Places" sidebar. Attempting to click
it again results in a Nautilus error saying the volume is not mounted
(which is true). Removing the drive causes the icons to disappear
from Desktop and "Places". On my debathena-workstation machine,
however, clicking the "eject" icon for a USB drive causes it to
unmount and disappear from the Desktop.
Additionally, ejecting CDs does not work correctly. I get a "You do
not have permission to eject this volume" error dialog, however it
does unmount the CD, and pressing the eject button the drive works.
The user is in the "cdrom" group, so I'm not sure why there would be a
permissions error. Again, this works fine on a debathena-workstation
machine where the user is in the "cdrom" group.
One thing I did note, on a -cluster machine, the "groups" command only
seems to report "nogroup", "nss-nonlocal-users" and my Hesiod groups.
It does not report any of the local groups I should have been added
to, such as "cdrom", "plugdev", "lpadmin", etc. On my -workstation
machine, it reports those correctly.
Normally I'd have to log in again for group changes to take effect.
Even though we're adding the user to these groups at login, are we
sure they're actually working? Because this nautilus weirdness would
seem to indicate that they're not....
-Jon
On Feb 17, 2009, at 11:11 PM, andrew m. boardman wrote:
>
> I wanted to mention this in case anyone else was spending cycles on
> it,
> since after spending a bit of time on it with rbasch and the
> zephyrverse
> earlier we mostly have an answer, but it's not checked in yet:
>
> - share-mounting /media makes usb device automounting work
> - bind-mounting /dev/shm and /dev/pts makes matlab and mathematica
> work
> (but recursively bind-mounting /dev is bad because unmounting becomes
> problematic)
>
> A replacement athena-login-snapshot that fixes these is in
> /afs/dev/user/amb/tmp, and will be checked in as soon as I'm sure
> that it
> both works and that the initial operations on /media are idempotent
> and
> don't need to be wrapped. (Or moved elsewhere, but I like keeping
> them
> with the other bind-mounting stuff for clarity's sake.)
>
> I like the unionfs idea a lot, but implementing it now to replace
> the LVM
> snapshot approach seems a touch ambitious.
