Topspin 2.1 Acquisition install and RHEL 6.3

Our previous topics on Topspin 2.1 install issues on a 64 bit system pretty much pertained to a data processing workstation.   When you include the full acquisition suite, which pretty much means the diskless client, you will face few more obstacles before you are done.  This is more to do with the modern EL6.3 version rather than the fact that the system is a 64 bit one.

We will mention a few, hopefully, helpful pointers through this post on those.

 bootparamd:   As of Topspin 2.1,  diskless still relies on bootparamd daemon for uploading to the spect client from the ASP_ST2 server.  With Enterprise Linux 6.3, bootparamd is no longer available as a rpm.  We have to either copy it from the TS2.1 install dvd and install it or pull a hopefully fresher version from the web.  I normally look in  www.rpmfind.net. 

• The install program gives this message box : 

You can in principle install the version from TS2.1 disk. But it is of the RHEL4 flavour,  I looked in rpmfind.net and found a version that is built for CentOS 5.8, which is close enough.  The version I pulled as of this writing :   0.17-26.el5_7.1.x86_64.   Please remember that the daemon I am running is on the 64 bit host and that is why I installed the x86_64 version.

portmap  :You will see an error message about the missing rpm for portmap.  Here is the message box :

•  Once again I pulled the 64 bit Centos 5.8 version for this rpm and installed it.  By the way, when you try installing this via the gui and get an error message, simply copy the /tmp/portmap.rpm to some other location and use rpm -ivh portmap_xxx.rpm   to complete the install.

tftp : Unless you installed it specifically,  you will get a message about missing tftp (trivial file transfer protocol). This should be available in the standard RHEL 6.3 repo and you can install it readily.

dhcp : Since the spectrometer host is also the ASP_ST2 server, it needs to run a dhcpd server to provide the static IP to spect  in the 149.236.99.0 subnet.  If you have not done so, you can install dhcp package from the standard repo.

To check if the above steps worked for you,  start the Topspin install program again and this time, only install diskless  from the list of available modules. If it goes without any errors then you are ok.

eth1 : Like me, if you are building a new system to replace an existing spectrometer host, make sure that you have a second ethernet NIC in the system. If not, the TS install program will complain about not being able to start the eth1 network card.  This is ok, as long as you remember to put that second ethernet card in the system and configure it to be eth1, either by hand or by using the NetworkManager.

If eth1 is not already configured at the time of TS2.1 install, your diskless install will complain that the dhcpd daemon cannot start. This is because the /etc/dhcpd.conf file is configured to listen to client traffic packets on the interface eth1, which is not up and running.  You can consult /var/log/messages to see these error messages, by simply grep-ing for dhcpd.