Re: [gentoo-cluster] High-Availability Howto for Gentoo

[Eric Thibodeau]

Mr. Rand(),

	I tend to prone the Diskless approach for the reasons you are mentionning. 
You can easily switch between roots with a network boot just by modifying 
your dhcp config and rebooting a node. This is really neat since you can have 
the dev environment on the actual cluster, test the new root with new libs 
and simply reboot some available nodes to test them. Furthermore, this 
approach opens the way to having multiple boot profiles with 
application-specific orientations (/me is thinking of the hellish deal of 
parallel Matlab with a polluted environment and the booting into a really 
optimized one for real MPI work ;)...)

	As for the "un-ncecessary attacker blahblahblah... Put your head behing the 
firewall. Beowulf nodes aren't meant to be publically available if they are 
to be efficient. nonetheless, departmental clusters (by night) could aslo be 
very possible with the diskless approach (even more so since you don't modify 
the current OS, which is most probably some horribly expensive Windows with 
the latest and greates Office suite which the deparment thinks is more 
important that the licences for Matlab...t'is not like we're trying to do 
some scientific work here eh!... (oops...dropped that one)...

Hehe, in any case, I have had only great experiences with diskless nodes at 
the moment and really hope to see the Gentoo community take off on Clusterd 
(with or without disks ;)

Le Mardi 11 Avril 2006 19:11, Dice R. Random a écrit :
> Hi all,
>
> On 4/11/06, Hanni Ali <hanni.ali@×××××.com> wrote:
> >  Gentoo Cluster Handbook
> >   I. Sys Admin Requirements - What reader must know before moving forward
> >   (maybe describe clustering types here?)
> >      i) Networking options etc.
> >      ii) Disked vs Diskless
> >      iii) more...
>
> I'm particularly interested in what people are using for diskless
> nodes and managing upgrades of system images across the cluster.  I'm
> envisioning a system where I have a build environment in which I can
> upgrade system software and test functionality on a development
> machine and then take a snapshot of the system and copy that up to a
> NAS device so that the nodes can then boot it.  It would be even
> better if I could specify which packages I wanted (or rather, didn't
> want) on the system images so that I could avoid having un-necessary
> and potentially attacker-friendly packages such as gcc and portage on
> the cluster nodes.
>

-- 
Eric Thibodeau
Neural Bucket Solutions Inc.
T. [phone]
C. [phone]

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