Occasionally as a Linux administrator you will be in the situation where working on a remote server and you are left with no option but to force a reboot the system. This may be for a number of reasons, but where I have found it most frequent is when working on Linux clusters in a remote location.
When the "reboot" or "shutdown" commands are executed daemons are gracefully stopped and storage volumes unmounted.
This is usually accomplished via scripts in the /etc/init.d directory which will wait for each daemon to shut down gracefully before proceeding on to the next one. This is where a situation can develop where your Linux server fails to shutdown cleanly leaving you unable to administer the system until it is inspected locally. This is obviously not ideal so the answer is to force a reboot on the system where you can guarantee that the system will power cycle and come back up. The method will not unmount file systems nor sync delayed disk writes, so use this at your own discretion.
To force the kernel to reboot the system we will be making use of the magic SysRq key.
The magic_SysRq_key provides a means to send low level instructions directly to the kernel via the /proc virtual file system.
To enable the use of the magic SysRq option type the following at the command prompt:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
Then to reboot the machine simply enter the following:
echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
Voilà! Your system will instantly reboot.
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Platforms supported
- Intel® / AMD™ 32 bit Linux
- Intel® / AMD™ 64 bit Linux
- HP PA-RISC HP-UX® 10.20 and above
- Sun® SPARC Solaris™ 8 and above
- HP Alpha OpenVMS 7.2-1 and above
- SCO® OpenServer 5.0.5 and above
- Sun® Intel® Solaris™ 10 and above
- IBM AIX® 4.3 and above
- HP Integrity OpenVMS 8.2-1 and above
- HP Intel® Itanium® HP-UX® 11.23 and above
- Mac OS X leopard 10.5 and above
Large File Support is available for Windows, Itanium HP-UX and Linux.
In this article Barry Mavin explains step by step how to setup a Linux HA (High Availability) cluster for the running of Recital applications on Redhat/Centos 5.3 although the general configuration should work for other linux versions with a few minor changes.
A quick tip for optimizing TCP performance on linux.
edit /etc/sysctl.conf add the lines:
If using gigabit ethernet:
net.ipv4.tcp_mem= 98304 131072 196608
net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling=1
net.core.wmem_default = 65536
net.core.rmem_default = 65536
net.core.wmem_max=8388608
To reload these use:
# sysctl -p
If using infiniband:
net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling=1
net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps=0
net.ipv4.tcp_sack=0
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem=10000000 10000000 10000000
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem=10000000 10000000 10000000
net.ipv4.tcp_mem=10000000 10000000 10000000
net.core.rmem_max=524287
net.core.wmem_max=524287
net.core.rmem_default=524287
net.core.wmem_default=524287
net.core.optmem_max=524287
net.core.netdev_max_backlog=300000
$ lsof | grep db.exe | grep accounts db.exe 16897 john 6uw REG 253,0 20012 3413872 /usr/recital100/qa/accounts.dbf db.exe 16897 john 7u REG 253,0 4176 3413885 /usr/recital100/qa/accounts.dbxIf you want to check for locks you can use lslk, for example;
$ lslk | grep db.exe | grep accounts db.exe 16897 253,0 3413872 20012 w 0 0 0 12319 0 /usr/recital100/qa/accounts.dbfIf you don't have lslk installed you can install it with one of the updaters, for example on redhat linux:
$ yum update lslk
Recital provides the following additional benefits:
- Easy to Install and Deploy - Users can set up Recital in minutes enabling organizations to deliver new applications faster than other databases.
- Easy to Administer - Recital is a low administration database that eliminates the need for highly trained, skilled, and costly database administrators to maintain the database.
- High Performance - Superior database performance for the most demanding of OLTP applications. Additionally, Clustered Recital provides 99.999% availability.
- Embeddable Library - Recital Embedded Edition provides in-process data storage engine that delivers all the features of a traditional relational database but in a size which makes it ideally suited for ISVs/VARs who need a small footprint and easy to use toolkit.
- Platform Independence - Recital runs on Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Windows, and Mac OS X giving organizations complete flexibility in delivering a solution on the platform of their choice.
If you have a live linux site that is running vmware virtual machines, you can pause the virtual machines when you want to perform a backup, I use acronis for linux which does incremental backups and you can specify a command to run before and after the backup, this allows backups to be performed at scheduled times daily without any intervention. In my examples below, the virtual machine i want to control is in /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
To pause the virtual machine on linux:
# vmrun pause /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
and then to unpause after the backup has completed:
# vmrun unpause /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
That is basicallty it, no need to attend the backup and it can be perfomed at a suitable time so no users are affected.
Incidentally, vmrun lets you startup a virtual machine at system startup too, without needing the GUI:
# vmrun start /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
Or alternatively stop it:
# vmrun stop /root/vmware/Recital/Recital.vmx
There are lots of other capabilities of this command, running applications inside the virtual machine etc etc. For full details just type vmrun in a terminal window.
When stress testing our loadbalancer, i was unable to get more than 20 reliable ssh connections. The following error would be reported.
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
The resolution for this is quite simple.
Edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and increase the MaxStartups. On my server i set this to 200.
Edit /etc/sysctrl.conf and add the following line:
net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 3000
Then apply this change:
# sysctl -p
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