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\newcommand*{\labTitle}{Assignment 2: \texttt{tomsrtbt} Diagnostic Tool}

\begin{document}

\paragraph{Due day:}

 your laboratory period in week 25 (Changed due to vigorous lobbying by
 a large part of group Y.)


\paragraph{What you need to hand in:}

You need to hand in two things:
\begin{itemize}
\item Your floppy disk, clearly labelled with your name, and your
  group letter (V,\ldots,Z)

\item A printout of the section of \texttt{rc.custom.gz} that you
  wrote, also clearly labelled with your name and group letter.  Do
  \emph{not} hand in a long printout of material written by anyone
  else (such as by Tom).
\end{itemize}
 
 You are required to create a diagnostic boot floppy disk that a
 customer can:
\begin{itemize}
\item put into their server 
\item turn on the server and go away for ten minutes
\item come back, remove the disk and bring back to you.
\end{itemize}

Note that for the user, the operation of this system must be totally
automatic.  The disk should also automatically shut down the computer.

For you, the disk should contain reports that you can read from the
disk under Linux, and can copy to your machine, allowing you to
diagnose problems with the user's server.  These reports are the same
reports as those created by the script \texttt{report} that is
available from the web pages for this subject:
\url{http://CSAlinux.tycm.vtc.edu.hk/ossi/} and
\url{http://nicku.thebbs.org/ossi/}.


\paragraph{Minimum requirements:}

You demonstrate during the lab session the following, then hand in
your disk.
\begin{itemize}
\item You are shown a computer that can boot Windows, but cannot boot
  Linux, even though Linux is installed on the computer.
\item You can boot this computer using your disk, then, with no other
  intervention, the computer shuts down.
\item You remove the disk from the first computer, then use your own
  computer to view the reports on the disk.
\item You are able to talk sensibly about some of the report files
  that you show from your disk, and can use the report files to
  explain what steps are necessary to allow the computer to boot Linux
  as well as Windows.
\end{itemize}


\paragraph{For more marks:}

You can do the following using your modified \texttt{tomsrtbt} disk:
\begin{itemize}
\item Cope gracefully with the floppy disk filling up, and cope well
  with unusual or error conditions.
\item Provide an option for the user to press a key within a timeout
  period to prevent the system from shutting down.
\item Explain a greater percentage of the reports.
\item Get configuration information from Windows partitions (including
  \acro{NTFS} if those are present)
\item Provide any other useful features
\end{itemize}


\paragraph{Some hints}

The worksheet for \texttt{tomsrtbt} contains a number of hints, but
some students have asked for more.
\begin{itemize}
\item If you are using \texttt{tomsrtbt-1.7.212.tar.gz} or later, you
  (probably) do not need to install the \texttt{libc5} packages from
  Red Hat 6.2

\item Simply download the latest \texttt{tomsrtbt} from 
\url{http://www.toms.net/rb/}

\item You do not need to modify the script \texttt{report}.

\item If you have negative sectors reported when running \texttt{sudo
    2/usr/doc/bulidit.s}, then you need to delete something to make
  space.

\item You can see which files take the most space in a directory using
  \texttt{ls~-lSr}

\item Many files in \texttt{2/usr/bin} are hard links to each other.
  The file still takes the same space until you have deleted all the
  links to that file.

\item Please think what it means if you do the following:
\begin{verbatim}
mount /dev/fdou1722 /fl
tar cf /fl/reports.tar /tmp/reports
bzip2 -9 /fl/reports.tar
\end{verbatim}
There is no point in over filling the floppy, then trying to compress
the data afterwords.

\item To decompress a tarball under Red Hat Linux, you can simply do
  this:
\begin{verbatim}
$ tar xvIf ~/reports.tar.bz2
\end{verbatim}%$
If you are working within \texttt{tomsrtbt}, it is still simple to
combine the \texttt{tar} and compress operations in one pipeline:
\begin{verbatim}
$ tar cf - /tmp/reports | bzip2 -9 > reports.tar.bz2
\end{verbatim}%$
will compress it; you can extract the tarball with:
\begin{verbatim}
$ bzip2 -d reports.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -
\end{verbatim}%$

\item You do not need to worry about trying to log in; this is handled
  by the \texttt{init} process \emph{after} the computer finishes
  executing \texttt{rc.custom.gz}

\item Use \texttt{tomsrtbt.FAQ} as a guide, particularly under the
  section \emph{Customisation}\@.

\item It is useful to use \texttt{echo} to show what is happening.

\item You may wish to use the command \texttt{mount} in your startup
  script to see what is going on.

\item You may wish to select the video resolution of $50 \times 60$
  characters, so that you can see what your script is doing.
\end{itemize}


\paragraph{About the configuration files in the reports:}

\textbf{\emph{Note that this is the most important part of the
    homework.}}  You need to be able to interpret the results.  There
is no point in being able to get a lot of information about a computer
if you cannot understand or use that information to solve problems!

\begin{itemize}
\item For more information about the configuration files that are
  copied by \texttt{report}, read Module~\vref{lt-cha:conf-files} of
  the Linux Training Materials.  Here is a list of configuration files
  and the location of their description in that module:
  \begin{itemize}
  \item \texttt{/etc/modules.conf}: see section~\vref{lt-sec:mod-conf}
  \item \texttt{/etc/fstab}: see section~\vref{lt-sec:mount}
  \item For information about the runlevels, see
    section~\vref{lt-sec:key-configs-run-levels} to
    \ref{lt-sec:changing-runlevels}.  Runlevels are important for you
    to make sense of the contents of the directories
    \texttt{/etc/rc.d/rc0.d}\ldots \texttt{/etc/rc.d/rc6.d} which are
    in the tarball \texttt{rc-d.tar.bz2} created by \texttt{report}.

  \item For information about the directory \texttt{/etc/rc.d} and
    below, stored in the tarball \texttt{rc-d.tar.bz2} by
    \texttt{report}, see
    section~\vref{lt-sec:key-configs-init-scripts} to
    section~\ref{lt-sec:key-configs-restart-services}.
  \end{itemize}
\item For information about \texttt{inittab}, do \texttt{man~inittab}
\item For information about \texttt{/etc/lilo.conf}, read the other
  material written by me, and also \texttt{man~lilo.conf}.  For a
  manual about \texttt{lilo}, do:
\begin{alltt}
$ cd /usr/share/doc/lilo\key{Tab}doc
$ gv User_Guide.ps &
\end{alltt}

\item Do \texttt{man~issue} for information about the \texttt{/etc/issue}
  file
\item Do \texttt{man resolv.conf} for information about
  \texttt{/etc/resolv.conf}
  
\item Chapter~2 of the \emph{Red Hat Linux Reference Guide} covers a
  lot of information about many of these things.  Install it from the
  documentation \CDROM, or read it online at
  \url{http://nicku.thebbs.org/doc/rhl-rg-en-7.0/ch-sysadmin.html} or
  \url{http://CSAlinux.tycm.vtc.edu.hk/doc/rhl-rg-en-7.0/ch-sysadmin.html}

\item The section \emph{Sysconfig Information} in
  \url{http://nicku.thebbs.org/doc/rhl-rg-en-7.0/s1-sysadmin-boot.html} has plenty of readable information about the important files under \texttt{/etc/sysconfig}, which \texttt{report} puts in a tarball called \texttt{sysconfig.tar.bz2}.

\item Information about the \texttt{/proc} filesystem is available
  from the kernel documentation; you can find it by:
\begin{alltt}
$ cd /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc\key{Tab}
$ less proc.txt
\end{alltt}
\end{itemize}

\end{document}