ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter, September 19th. 2001 (fwd)

Wed Sep 19 09:56:20 PDT 2001

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 18:53:47 +0200
From: Antoine Brenner <abrenner at alinka.com>
To: clustering at alinka.com
Subject: ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter, September 19th. 2001
Resent-Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 18:53:50 +0200 (CEST)
Resent-From: clustering at alinka.com

The ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter,

Wednesday, September the 19th. 2001

Dear readers, I am happy to send you this week's edition of
clustering at alinka.com

clustering at alinka.com is a free weekly e-mail newsletter on linux
clustering. It provides a summary of the weekly activity in
mailing-lists relative to linux clustering (such as beowulf,
linux virtual server or linux-ha) and general clustering news.
For more information about ALINKA, see: http://www.alinka.com

News from the High Performance world, by Dr Laurent Gatineau
(lgatineau at alinka.com)
======================================================================
Software for Beowulf cluster
========
FAI (fully automatic installation) 2.2 released [1]

FAI is  a  non  interactive  system  to  install  a Debian   GNU/Linux
operating system on a PC cluster. You can take one or more virgin PCs,
turn  on the   power  and after  a few   minutes  Linux is  installed,
configured and running  on the whole  cluster, without any interaction
necessary. Thus it's  a scalable method for  installing and updating a
Beowulf cluster  or a network of  workstations unattended  with little
effort involved. FAI uses the  Debian distribution and a collection of
shell and Perl scripts  for the installation  process. Changes  to the
configuration files  of  the operating  system  are made  by cfengine,
shell and Perl scripts.
[1] http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
>From http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001268.html

Tips and tricks from the Beowulf mailing list
========

* Pedro Díaz Jiménez [m1] posted a link [1] to a small FAQ about cluster.
[1] http://planetcluster.org/clusterfaq.html
[m1] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001265.html

* Marc Cozzi  [m1] is looking  for  using PGI  BLAS routines with  the
  Linpack benchmark.  Eswar Dev [m2] gave  an example using ATLAS BLAS
  library.  Daniel Kidger  [m3] pointed him to  a document showing bad
  performances with the PGI BLAS routines.
[1] http://computational-battery.org/Programvare/blas-lib-comparison.html
[m1] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001267.html
[m2] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001274.html
[m3] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001277.html

* About  switches, Eric  Kuhnke [m1] wrote  that he  is happy  with HP
  Procurve  4000M,  but modules  are  expensive (look  how to get them
  cheaper  [m2,m3]).  There was also  a  discussion about SCI networks
  [m4,m5] and Myrinet ones [m6,m7].
[m1] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001246.html
[m2] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001249.html
[m3] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001251.html
[m4] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001272.html
[m5] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001278.html
[m6] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001275.html
[m7] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001279.html

* Karl Bellve [m1] is looking  for copper based  Gigabit card on Alpha
  system.  Donald  Becker  [m2]  answered that Syskonnect,  Intel  and
  NatSemi  DP83820 network  cards  have drivers   and work with  Alpha
  system.
[m1] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001250.html
[m2] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001252.html

News from MOSIX mailing list by Benoit des Ligneris
<bligneri at physique.usherb.ca>
=====================================================================
No News from Mosix this week, expect a double Letter next week.

News from the High Availability world
======================================================================
DRBD devel by Guillaume GIMENEZ (ggimenez at alinka.com)
========
* David Krovich announced [m1] The DRBD HOWTO release 0.5 is
available [1]
[1] http://www.slackworks.com/~dkrovich/DRBD/
[m1] http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/3756/0/6626476/

Failsafe by Guillaume GIMENEZ (ggimenez at alinka.com)
========
* Joachim Gleissner announced [m2] that a new release of failsafe
for SuSE is available [2]. it includes two patches for filesystem
and nfs resources [m3]
[2] ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/failsafe
[m2] http://community.tummy.com/pipermail/linuxfailsafe/2001-September/001219.html
[m3] http://community.tummy.com/pipermail/linuxfailsafe/2001-September/001218.html

Linux-HA dev by Rached Ben Mustapha (rached at alinka.com)
========
* Alan Robertson posted [m1] a request for comments on a paper [l1]
  that he wrote about STONITH.
[m1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ha-dev&m=100034813201067&w=2
[l1] http://linux-ha.org/heartbeat/

LVS by Rached Ben Mustapha (rached at alinka.com)
========
* Wensong Zhang announced [m1] the availability of LVS 0.9.4, that is
  available on the LVS website [l1]. He also posted [m2] the url to
  the patch-only version [l2], and a link to the latest version of
  ipvsadm [l3].
[l1] http://linux-vs.org/
[l2] http://linux-vs.org/software/kernel/linux-2.4.9-ipvs-0.9.4.patch.gz
[l3] http://linux-vs.org/software/kernel/ipvsadm-1.20-1.src.rpm
[m1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=100082842828624&w=2
[m2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=100090377721877&w=2

News on the Filesystems front
======================================================================
Coda by Ludovic Ishiomin (lishiomin at alinka.com)
========
* Matthias Teege asked for compatibility between Coda and NIS and replied
himself giving the answer [1m].
* Steffen Neumann gave comments about the situation where Coda is not
usefull [2m].
[1m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0780.html
[2m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0786.html

Intermezzo by Ludovic Ishiomin (lishiomin at alinka.com)
========
* Peter Braam announced Intermezzo 1.0.5.2 [1m].
* Shirish Phatak forwarded the announce of librsync 0.9.5 [2m].
[1m] http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/8078/0/6615430/
[2m] http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/8077/0/6639831/

XFS by Ludovic Ishiomin (lishiomin at alinka.com)
========
* Masahino Asano was unable to mount a LVM snapshot of an XFS filesystem
because the device was marked read-only by LVM [1m].

[1m] http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0109/msg00304.html and the
followings.

News on other cluster related topics
======================================================================
linux-ia64 by Guillaume GIMENEZ (ggimenez at alinka.com)
========
* Doug Beattie started an interesting thread about
32 bit & 64 bit libraries coexistence. (start [m4])
[m4]
https://external-lists.valinux.com/archives/linux-ia64/2001-September/002149.html

LTSP by Bruno Muller (bmuller at alinka.com)
========
* Jim McQuillan anncounced that LTSP 2.09pre2 is available for download[m1].
[m1] http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/10022/100/6637852/

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