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20 May 2019 (last significant edit)

This page is a launching point for information about the This page describes certain features of the " Linux Desktop 2.0 " pilot/R&D project.  While this project has been in progress for some time, these notes begin in July 2018.

There are an estimated 200-300 Linux desktop users at SLAC.  This project aims to provide a basic managed and maintained building block desktop from which users may customize to their specific needs.  At this writing, either Ubuntu or CentOS are available options.  This is very much a work in progress....

To-Do

•   consider should the  user  have the netboot file remain active and have the user manually remove the link that makes it active  with
  echo "get Kickstart_end" | /usr/bin/tftp lnxpapa  or do this for them automatically after the first build. Make this an attribute for the node build ?  Consider this for ubuntu too - And ubuntu and kickstart are not great together, unless this is very, very dated https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility
• Decide if we want the pxekicktit to by default run chef on the node. As of 2018-09-27, a build with ks.cfg.centos7.linux_desktop_2 does not run chef. I suggest we do run chef in the default installation, and one picks ks.cfg.centos7.linux_desktop_2.no_chef_run  If one does not want to run chef. 

Current Pilot Machine Status

A test machine, named comet2, was setup in Tom G's office on 7/13/2018.  Linux (centos7) was installed over the network.  Andrew set up the "old style" kerberos authentication to allow site-wide logins.  This is expected to change in the near future to a Windows authentication scheme.

At this time, comet2 is considered available for reboot or rebuild with little or no notification as experts continue their development of the deployment software.

List of candidate add-on software to be included in CentOS 7 network-install image.

Notes:

X11 & GUI installed in this way:  

curl http://yum/centos-gui > /tmp/centos-gui
/bin/sh /tmp/centos-gui

...

Software installed via the GUI: Thunderbird, emacs, LibreOffice

sudo gnome-software

...

Attempt to install FastX downloaded from www.starnet.com.  Code is unpacked from a tar.gz file and run without any special installation.  Attempt to configure SLAC but code fails with a relocation error associated with /lib64/libssl.so.10

...

OS Updates

On a new build, old or new hardware

...

 check if firmware updates need to happen

- BIOS, IDRAC, DISK/PERC

NETDB needs for the node:

a. NetDB must have these options:  --options filename=pxelinux.0,next-server=lnxpapa,tftp-server-name=lnxpapa

b. NetDB must have dhcp enabled

c. Determine the pxeboot-kickstart to use. There are many!

and we should agree on which one to use. I'd recommend we make that part

of the netdb record the way we do with some newer builds - I think it

helps. See for instance comet2

pxekickit: CentOS7/default.netboot.CentOS7.linux_desktop_2

...

Determine is there anything special about this machine that needs to be considered

If this is rhel[56] node with a taylor.opts take a look and see if there

is a one to one correstpondence between what taylor.opts is doing on the

node and what we can do in chef.  For example, if the pre-cheffed node is

using automounter, then all parties ( unix platform, the user)  need to know that no NFS native mounts are supported.

an effort to evolve from the "RHEL6-64 desktop server" model to one which is more up-to-date and more sustainable by the folks in SCS.  The current focus of this work is to provide a path for updating an existing Linux RHEL6 (or earlier) machine to either Centos 7 or Ubuntu (16 or 18).  Machines are expected to be resident at SLAC and connected to the SLAC public network and used in a scientific or engineering environment.

Contents:

1. The Centos 7 pilot project: a description of building a Centos 7 based scientific/engineering desktop
2. References relating to building a Ubuntu based desktop

User Log:

References:

1. SLAC minimum security requirements:
   https://docs.slac.stanford.edu/sites/pub/Publications/701-I02-001-00_Min_Sec_Req_for_Comp.pdf

2. Stanford minimum security requirements:  
   https://uit.stanford.edu/guide/securitystandards

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