[Beowulf] cluster deployment and config management

[Tim Cutts]

Sanger made a similar separation with our FAI-based Ubuntu deployments.  The FAI part of the installation was kept as minimal as possible, with the task purely of partitioning and formatting the hard disk of the machine, determining the appropriate network card configuration, and unpacking a minimal OS image.  Further package installations and configuration was done later by cfengine (and later ansible, when we moved to that)

Regards,

Tim

On 05/09/2017, 08:21, "Beowulf on behalf of Joe Landman" <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org on behalf of joe.landman at gmail.com> wrote:

    Ahhh ... One of the things we did with our toolchain (it is open source, 
    I've just never pushed it to github) was to completely separate booting 
    from configuration.  That is, units booted to an operational state 
    before we applied configuration.  This was in part due to long 
    experience with nodes hanging during bootup with incorrect 
    configurations.  If you minimize the chance for this, your nodes 
    (barring physical device failure) always boot.  The only specific 
    opinion we had w.r.t. this system was that the nodes had to be bootable 
    via PXE, and there fore a working dhcp needed to exist on the network.
    
    




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