258. Briefly: Throttle CPU between certain hours on linux

Because university administrators apparently don't consider academics trustworthy enough, at my university each office has an AC unit which cannot be adjusted. Sure, we can set the temperature -- but the unit cannot be turned on or off. Instead it shuts itself off at 5 pm and goes back on at 8 am. Same goes for weekends -- the unit shuts itself off on Friday at 5 pm and turns itself back on on Monday morning.

Obviously all the windows are sealed shut.

Which is fair enough in terms of saving energy -- no administrator would be in their office over the weekend. But most academics are constantly fighting to keep themselves afloat in terms of work, and most of us are in on weekends too.

But this is Australia -- the winters get cold enough that it's unpleasant to sit in an unheated office (no insulation) and the summers hot enough that computers get unhappy.

And I'm running a cluster in my office, so on a warmish weekend (above 20 degrees) my tiny office gets really hot. Last night one of my nodes overheated and shut itself down.

So, in want of a better solution, I figure I will throttle the CPUs overnight to give the fans a fighting chance to keep the cpus cool when the aircon is off. In particular weekends, with no air-conditioning from 5 pm on Friday until 8 am on Monday, are a challenge.

---

Enough talking! 

Put the following files in /etc/cron.d

throttle.sh

#!/bin/bash
## minimise heating overnight
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 1 -g powersave
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 2 -g powersave
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 3 -g powersave
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 4 -g powersave
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 5 -g powersave

slowdown.sh

#!/bin/bash
## minimise heating overnight
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 0 -g userspace
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 1 -g userspace
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 2 -g userspace
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 3 -g userspace
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 4 -g userspace
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 5 -g userspace
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 0 -f 2.2G
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 1 -f 2.2G
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 2 -f 2.2G
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 3 -f 2.2G
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 4 -f 2.2G
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 5 -f 2.2G

unthrottle.sh

#!/bin/bash
## maximise performance during the day
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 0 -g ondemand
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 1 -g ondemand
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 2 -g ondemand
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 3 -g ondemand
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 4 -g ondemand
/usr/bin/cpufreq-set -c 5 -g ondemand

Now edit /etc/crontab

00 08   * * 1-5 root    sh /etc/cron.d/unthrottle.sh

00 17   * * 1-4 root    sh /etc/cron.d/slowdown.sh
00 17   * * 5 root    sh /etc/cron.d/throttle.sh

And you're good to go.

257. Wine 1.5.15 on debian testing/wheezy --finally sorting out that annoying libjpeg

UPDATE 16 May 2013: See here for Wine 1.5.30: http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/416-wine-1530-in-chroot.html

UPDATE (10th Jan 2013): See here for Wine 1.5.21 using the multiarch approach: http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/308-compiling-wine-1521-on-debian.html

Pretty much just follow this post:
The big difference here is that it seems to compile ok with libjpeg.

And here are the release notes

Install the pre-requisites 
(haven't checked this list for a while -- there may be a few too many packages)

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-dev bison flex gcc libc6-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype6-dev libglu-dev libgsm1-dev libice-dev libjpeg-dev libldap-dev libmpg123-dev libncurses5-dev libopenal-dev libpng-dev libsm-dev libssl-dev libusb-dev libx11-dev libxcomposite-dev libxcursor-dev libxext-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev libxml2-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libxslt-dev libxt-dev libxxf86vm-dev make libcapi20-dev liblcms-dev libsane-dev libhal-dev libdbus-1-dev valgrind prelink libcups2-dev opencl-dev lib32opencl1 oss4-dev gettext lib32v4l-dev lib32ncurses5-dev lib32asound2-dev libtiff4-dev libgphoto2-2-dev

Get new source:

cd ~/tmp
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/wine/files/Source/wine-1.5.15.tar.bz2
tar xvf wine-1.5.15.tar.bz2
cd wine-1.5.15/

To avoid

configure: WARNING: libjpeg 32-bit development files not found, JPEG won't be supported.

edit /usr/include/jpeglib.h and delete

24   #ifndef JCONFIG_INCLUDED        /* in case jinclude.h already did */
25   #include "jconfig.h"            /* widely used configuration options */
26   #endif

Then do 

./configure

which yields

configure: libOSMesa 32-bit development files not found (or too old), OpenGL rendering in bitmaps won't be supported.
configure: OpenCL 32-bit development files not found, OpenCL won't be supported.
configure: gstreamer-0.10 base plugins 32-bit development files not found, gstreamer support disabled
configure: libgsm 32-bit development files not found, gsm 06.10 codec won't be supported.
configure: Finished.  Do 'make' to compile Wine.

Neither of these issues are fatal -- depending on what you use wine for.

Time to install:
make
sudo checkinstall --install=no
sudo dpkg -i wine-1.5.15-1_amd64.deb

And you're done!

256. Briefly: Setting up ganglia on a debian beowulf cluster

On all your nodes (e.g. using clusterssh):
sudo apt-get install ganglia-monitor

On your front node only:
sudo apt-get install ganglia-webfrontend
sudo cp /etc/ganglia-webfrontend/apache.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ganglia.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

Edit /etc/ganglia/gmetad.conf and at a minimum add

data_source "debiwolf" 10 beryllium tantalum boron neon

or

data_source "debiwolf" 10 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.131 192.168.1.150 192.168.1.120

You can also specify additional information

gridname "rupert"
authority "http://192.168.1.1/ganglia/"

Go to http://localhost/ganglia in your browser. If you get

There was an error collecting ganglia data (127.0.0.1:8652): fsockopen error: Connection refused

Then do
sudo service gmetad start

Otherwise you should see something like this:

On all your nodes:
You may want to do
sudo service ganglia-monitor restart

if some of your nodes aren't showing.

Customize:
Edit your /etc/ganglia/gmond.conf:

cluster {
        name = "Debiwolf"
        owner = "Me"
        latlong = "unspecified"
        url = "None"
}