Re: [gentoo-cluster] Gentoo clustering "à la" www.clustermatic.org (PXE booted nodes)

[Jordan Dawe]

>In any case, we're getting Off Topic, I wanna make this a Gentoo Kluster (C)
>(one may inster Kick Ass somewhere in there :P ). Moreover, I am _mandated_
>to do this as part of my masters _and_ document this.... Document which I
>will of course make available to the Gentoo community. I'm almost thinking of
>looking onto either an ebuild or even a special "profile" for making the
>node's ROOT image (with a modified baselayout)....
>
>So, as always, if anyone can help out in either pointing to documents or
>sharing experience, I would be more than glad to put this together and really
>put Gentoo on the HPC map.
>
>
I tried to bang together something like this while I was building a 
cluster for our department.  It's real tricky though, especially if you 
don't want to mount root over NFS--and mounting root over NFS always 
seems like a huge amount of overhead to me.  I was able to get a second 
box booting off tftp and mounting filesystems across nfs, but I didn't 
have any idea how to set about making a boot image and transmitting that 
to a ramdisk to boot off of.

Have you checked out warewulf?  It's quite good; a complete ramdisk 
based cluster setup package.  I switched to it after failing with 
gentoo.  If I was going to approach this project, I would rip warewulf 
apart and see how they do what they do.  Warewulf is RPM based, but it 
should be easy to convert a lot of the RPM steps in warewulf to 
ebuilds.  Then you could make an ebuild to generate the ramdisk image, 
like warewulf does.  In any case, Warewulf has solved a lot of these 
problems in a different context; check it out.

http://www.warewulf-cluster.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi

It also has tools to manage a cluster, observe processess on the nodes, 
etc.  I'm really, really happy with it, except for the "not working with 
gentoo" part of it.

Jordan

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