software running on the nodes?

[Bill Broadley]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 07:54:03AM -0600, Mike Eggleston wrote:
> Has this been asked for? Can we have a quick, informal poll
> on what os/distribution/rpms/etc is running on people's nodes?
> I have a test node running the linux terminal server project (ltsp).
> I just read a blurb of someone using the linux router project
> as their node base. What are people using?

I use the LTSP bootdisk, with my kernel and a few tweaks:
	I fdisk the local disk (for /swap and /scratch)
	I mkfs and mkswap
	I pivot_root

Once I pivot_root I'm in a full redhat-8 install with the following
modification:
	/dev is mounted from devfs
	/ is read-only (remote NFS mounted, shared across clients)
	/var is read-write (remote NFS mounted, shared across clients)
	/home is automounted

I have 32 clients, if a disk dies I can reboot without a disk, or
reboot with a new disk and within 60 seconds or so it's back up and
accepting jobs.

Oh I installed Sun Grid Engine, it's a rather nice batch queue (at
least so far).  

I'm a big fan of the mostly diskless nodes, it's a dream to admin.
It's quite easy to add nodes (just add a dhcp entry, create a /var, 
and tell the batch queue about them).


-- 
Bill Broadley
Mathematics
UC Davis