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DoESLiverpool / somebody-should

A place to document practices on the wiki and collect issues/suggestions/to-do items for the physical space at DoES Liverpool
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Fix up PC installation procedure #1127

Open goatchurchprime opened 5 years ago

goatchurchprime commented 5 years ago

At the bottom of this page is a link to gitlab for installation files. This link is broken. https://github.com/DoESLiverpool/somebody-should/wiki/PC-Systems

Need to find this files and work out the minimum of software and software keys that we need on these PCs to keep them running and doing the jobs they need to do.

As it's our policy to install free software as and when it's needed, we don't really need lists of what's on each machine -- unless it's been specially configured to do a job related to the equipment that it operates. Only the core proprietary software needs to be properly documented.

johnmckerrell commented 5 years ago

The files are there you just don't have access. We've mostly moved away from GitLab but struggled to move these big files I can give you them locally sometime.

goatchurchprime commented 5 years ago

Need to know what they are and what they are for. Need to be able to recreate the systems in case one of these PCs goes down. Best to get all the things necessary before such a thing happens.

MatthewCroughan commented 5 years ago

The main problem with doing these sorts of things on baremetal is that the backup size can become huge. The more things we have in the space that run on Linux the better, since we can keep a base image of linux, and ZFS snapshots which can then be applied to those base images.

This is one method I'm fond of, since I've got a bit of experience in ZFS now having ran the lan, it's immensely powerful for this sort of snapshotting relatively frequently, without racking up large amounts of data, providing not much has changed on the disk.

Another method is to run these devices on balena, basing their installs on it, meaning we can reproduce and replicate a device at will, like ansible, but easier to maintain, track, as simple as flashing an image to an SD card.

Having homogenous x86 hardware at DoES for all of the appliance systems would also make a lot of sense, considering the odroid h2 is only $110 for a better cpu, gpu, etc than all of the systems we currently have running right now. And it would be capable of running fusion 360 and more, locally. It could be provisioned to run as a thin-client when someone needed to do something more powerful like render.

The most important benefit of using homogeneous hardware is the repeatability of reprovisioning, as people wouldn't need to tear out an old hard drive, they'd just need to follow instructions for a live boot, or reflash an ssd with etcher, or an sd card in the case that we can replace some machines with Pi's.

At some point in the near future, I'm willing to commit to this, document it and set it up in the space. It's honestly not hard, it will be far easier than creating instructions on how to recreate the setup, you would just have to flash the backup to a hard drive, sd card, etc.

MatthewCroughan commented 5 years ago

https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Pi-High-Speed-Peripherals/dp/B07N298F2B

These aren't yet available in the UK, but would be a very good platform to base our systems on, since they're x86 and would allow us to install various Windows environments.

ajlennon commented 5 years ago

Ordered one to play with - arriving 12th-14th

ajlennon commented 5 years ago

You tried running Windows in QEMU @MatthewCroughan ?

MatthewCroughan commented 5 years ago

@ajlennon Lots, but never raw from the cli, I use libvirt to make things portable and easy via yml files. Here's an example of a libvirt project https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

MatthewCroughan commented 5 years ago

@ajlennon https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2/ Odroid have finally sorted out their supply issues with Intel.

These machines are the dream I was talking about. They support VT-D, and GVT-g, and they have an NVME slot on them. If you wanted light-weight, even portable OpenBalena I can't really think of a better fit. With GVT-g you can spawn up to around 3 gpus for usage with virtualized operating systems and output them separately via display port to separate monitors, with around 5% overhead on cpu and 0% overhead on other I/O devices (providing they are passed through instead of virtualized).

MatthewCroughan commented 5 years ago

https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd

Running our own KMS auth server on the DoES network would allow us to stop worrying about license keys, in a way that breaks the Windows EULA, but not the law.

We can then provision Windows machines in the same way we would Linux machines, create isos for flashing to various utilities, they would have a script that runs on startup that looks something like this:

slmgr /ipk M7XTQ-FN8P6-TTKYV-9D4CC-J462D

slmgr /skms kms.doesliverpool.com

slmgr /ato

Obviously this wouldn't be publicly exposed, and could stay on the local network, so it could have the address kms.local

I also know that this might not be acceptable by some people's standards. So I'm just throwing it out there as a serious option, considering we have nothing at the moment, and I'd be willing to implement this.

arthurrowland commented 3 years ago

does-vinylcutter is now out of action and I can't find information to get it back online. Not a complaint - just documenting.

More info in #1208 in [this comment)(https://github.com/DoESLiverpool/somebody-should/issues/1208#issuecomment-850354230)

JackiePease commented 3 years ago

It might be worth trying one of the new laptops - see #1571, #1572 (not sure if you'd have to download InkCut or whether it's part of the standard Inkscape download these days). If that works then we can use a similar build on the Vinyl Cutter PC

ajlennon commented 3 years ago

The installation procedure for the new laptops and/or Linux-based floating systems in future is here

https://github.com/DoESLiverpool/somebody-should/wiki/Laptop-Systems