Missing Adobe fonts

If you try to start up remote X11 application to display on your Ubuntu machine, and get errors complaining about missing fonts like:

-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-10-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1

here's how to fix it.

You have to install not just fonts, but also the font server. First, the font server:

sudo apt-get install xfs xfstt 

and the fonts:

sudo apt-get install t1-xfree86-nonfree ttf-xfree86-nonfree ttf-xfree86-nonfree-syriac xfonts-75dpi xfonts-100dpi

And then, restart X11 on your Ubuntu machine, or just reboot.

How to get "normal" scrollbars in Ubuntu Unity

I hate the little scrollbar in Ubuntu because on a laptop, it's harder to get precise control of the cursor to hit the few-pixel-width area (the orange bit in the first image below).

To get "normal" scrollbars, type this command:

gsettings set com.canonical.desktop.interface scrollbar-mode normal

Should you want to get the Ubuntu-style scrollbar back, reset the parameter:

gsettings reset com.canonical.desktop.interface scrollbar-mode 

Nice online resource plus ebook for MPI

Wes Kendall from University of Tennessee, Knoxville has produced a website showing how to code in MPI, including installing an Amazon EC2 cluster. For portability, the site content is also available as a Kindle ebook for only US$5.

Scripting Bright Cluster Manager

At my new position as Sr. SysAdmin at Drexel's University Research Computing Facility (URCF), we use Bright Cluster Manager. I am new to Bright, and I am finding it very nice, indeed. One of its best features is programmatic access via a Python API. In about half an hour, I figured out enough to modify the node categories of all the nodes in the cluster.

Node categories group nodes which have similar configurations and roles. Example configuration may be a list of remote filesystem mounts, and an example role may be Grid Engine compute node with 64 job slots. The cluster at URCF has 64-core AMD nodes and 16-core Intel nodes, so I created a category for each of these. Then, I needed to change the node categories from the default to the architecture-specific categories. The script below did  it for the Intel nodes.

Google Blogger/Blogspot is a second-class citizen

I just browsed through old posts and realized that all the embedded images are now gone. This happened, I am guessing, due to the integration of Google+ with Blogger. Some of my old posts are now fairly useless without the images. Grrr.

Design Change

I just discovered that Blogger's dynamic layout broke Readability. So, it's back to a basic layout.

Introduction to Lustre from Whamcloud's Andreas Dilger