Radio Oceanography Laboratory Support | HFDR / Installation of customized Mint 22.1 64-bit on Generic HFDR field machines

These master instructions are for installing a system from custom Mint 22.1 iso image, which contains all the configurations required, using the Cubic toolbox. We recommend to always perform installation through this customized image. We also recommend installing Cubic on the lab reference machine for creating additional customization.

0. First, configure BIOS:

Click on keyboard key DEL or F2 to enter BIOS setup
Click "Power" tab
Click "Balanced performance" tab
Click "Secondary Power Settings"
Scroll down to "After Power Failure" and select "Power On"
Click "Boot" tab
Click "Enable USB" tab
Click "Boot USB first" tab
Disable all "Network boot" tabs
Click on F10 to Save and Exit, click OK

A USB key connected to a USB-3 port (blue) may not be recognized at boot, always use a USB-2 port (black).

2. Prepare a USB key with the customized Mint 22.1 64-bit radlab desktop version; from an ubuntu laptop:

Applications->System tools->Administration->Startup Disk Creator
shutdown laptop and plug USB key on the target NUC to be installed.
start machine and select "Install mint".

3. Select icon "Install mint 22.1". installation", then "Erase disk and install mint". Verify that the SSD disk is partitioned with a small UEFI/fat32 boot partition, and a single ext4 partition:

 Device       Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
 /dev/sda1     2048   1050623   1048576   512M EFI System
 /dev/sda2  1050624 488396799 487346176 232.4G Linux filesystem

4. Define user ruser (1000) (group ruser(1000) will be automatically created) and set password (defaut ruser), enable automatic login.

5. Define computer name as radlab-xxxx, the 4 letters of the site name (four letters are preferred by the international network). Some processing scripts assumes that the site name is exactly radlab- followed by 4 letters and may break if another number of characters is used.

6. Set time zone to any US time zone.

Do not use another country time zone even if you set up from another country, because this will enable a non-English local setting, altering the date format, and several scripts as well as crontab may break down. Chose any US time zone now, and reset tzdata to UTC later.

7. Computer will ask to restart when installation is complete; remove the USB key; reboot into the new installation and login as ruser.

8. Add local hosts:

add at the start of the file after the 127 hosts:

128.171.154.150 realtime sunrise.satlab.hawaii.edu 128.171.154.155 sunset sunset.satlab.hawaii.edu 128.171.219.11 hfr hfr.satlab.hawaii.edu

137.184.4.147 realtime www.oceanphysics.org

172.16.2.12 dtacq dtacq1 172.16.2.101 pa

9. Set the proper time/clock and locale:

 root# dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

and set timezone to "Etc" then "UTC" through the menus (use TAB then ENTER to go through the menus); this will ensure that the crontabs run on UTC, not local time. It is important to do this now to avoid irreparable confusion in the data files time-tags.

If you installed the PC being outside the US, the installer may have outsmarted you by setting the default language based on where your IP is located, and you may see day/month in tagalog, mandarin, spanish or french (this affects date, and any script that would use date, which are many).

 root# vi /etc/default/locale

and change back all entries to "en_US.UTF-8", deleting any other language. In some instances it may be necessary to run

 root# dpkg-reconfigure locales

unselecting any other language, and to add LANG=en_US.UTF-8 to /etc/environment. Correcting a wrongly set locale can be frustrating.

10. Enable firewall:

create file /root/ufw.config

 # enable UFW
 ufw enable
 # allow all outgoing
 ufw default allow outgoing
 # disallow all incoming
 ufw default deny incoming on eno1
 # SSH
 ufw allow 22
 # Allow all from local net (pi, dtacq, ...)
 #ufw allow from 192.168.1.0/24
 # UFW Status
 ufw status verbose

activate firewall with
root# sh /root/ufw.config
make sure that the router firewall does not have more stringent restrictions

11. Listen to outside network time servers:

On the NUC:

 root# vi /etc/ntpsec/ntp.conf

learn more about ntp pools on http://www.ntp.org/ and search for nearest servers
enable logging driftfile
enable listening to nearest servers
enable statistics logging, uncommentstatsdir(i.e. remove the # sign on column 1)

 # minimal /etc/ntp.conf
 driftfile /var/lib/ntpsec/ntp.drift
 leapfile /usr/share/zoneinfo/leap-seconds.list
 statsdir /var/log/ntpstats/
 statsdir /var/log/ntpsec/
 statistics loopstats peerstats clockstats
 filegen loopstats file loopstats type day enable
 filegen peerstats file peerstats type day enable
 filegen clockstats file clockstats type day enable
 pool 0.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org iburst
 pool 1.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org iburst
 pool 2.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org iburst
 pool 3.ubuntu.pool.ntp.org iburst

restart ntp client:

 root# service ntp restart

after running for a while, do

 root# ntptrace

if properly synchronized, answer should be something like

 localhost: stratum 2, offset 0.000139, synch distance 0.004383

if instead you get stratum 16 distance 0.000, something is wrong, you're only seeing local clock

12. Configure ruser account:

launch firefox, open http://www.oceanphysics.com/support/ and set as default home page.
make oceanphysics_icon.bmp the screen background in Settings->Background
disable power management in Settings->Power (never suspend, never blank screen, dim screen off)
enable automatic login in Settings->User
create the ruser crontab with crontab -e
to start acquisitions with radar_control_gnsss, adjust the schedule and acquisition length (here for 15 min):

 # m h  dom mon dow command
 29 * * * * /bin/csh /home/wera/bin/mergebeam.csh > /home/ruser/logs/mergebeam.log 2>&1

 # launch acquisition, specify number of seconds as parameter
 0,15,30,45 * * * * /home/ruser/bin/radar_control_gnss 650 >> /home/ruser/logs/radar_control.log 2>&1

 # log of temperatures
 0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /home/ruser/bin/gettemps

 # log of dtacq voltages
 0 * * * * /home/ruser/bin/getvolts

 # launch mkdaydir
 0 14 * * * /home/ruser/bin/mvdaydir

 # daily backup
 0 0 * * * /usr/bin/rsync -av /home/wera /home/ruser /media/ruser/RADATA

13. Enable password-less login:

To allow pushing the data for automated upload from this NUC machine to target hosts, copy/paste file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (pre-configured with the ruser account, see below) to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on each target machine. Verify that the password-less login works by doing

 ruser$ ssh remote_machine

and adding key to known_hosts.

14. Format archive disk (Data)

New disks MUST always be reformatted as follows:

 root# sudo gparted

deleting any pre-existing partition; commit changes
create a new partition table of type gpt
format disk with a single partition type 'ext4
Add the disk to /etc/fstab. First find the disk's UUID

 root# blkid

Add a line with the UUID, mount point, filesystem type, options:

 root# UUID= /home/ruser/data	ext4	errors=remount-ro 0 2

 root# mount -a

15. Format archive disk (Backup)

New disks MUST always be reformatted as follows:

 root# sudo gparted

identify and unmount NTFS partition; commit changes
deleting any pre-existing partition; commit changes
create a new partition table of type gpt
format disk with a single partition type 'ext4
name and label partition as "RADATA", commit changes
physically disconnect and reconnect drive

 root# chown -R ruser.ruser .

Add the disk to /etc/fstab.

/dev/sdc1 /media/ruser/RADATA ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 3

16. Configure the D-Tacq

Follow the separate instructions.

17. Matlab

change folder permissions:

 root# chmod 755 /usr/local/MATLAB/R2014b
 root# find /usr/local/MATLAB/R2014b/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

18. Python

 ruser$ apt install python3-matplotlib 
 ruser$ apt install python3-numpy 
 ruser$ apt install python3-scipy