[Beowulf] need for an advice on nfs and diskless clients

[Maxime Kinet]

> Maxime,
> Would it be feasible to use "ln" to create symbolic links to  
> populate /tftproot/192.168.1.N, for each node N,  from say /tftproot/ 
> generic ?
I tried that trick but didn't work. Apparently, symbolic links are not  
enough to link files at boot time.

What I was wondering is, if the directories /tftpboot/192.168.1.N  
contains sub-directories that are indentical for every node, and that  
are not supposed to be modified by the nodes, why not put them in a  
directory /tftpboot/generic and make the node mount the it from there?  
The problem is I have no idea of which directories have to be local,  
and which could be shared...

> Peter


Thanks for the answer anyway.
------------------
Maxime Kinet
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Physique Statistique et Plasmas, CP 231
Campus Plaine - Boulevard du Triomphe,
1050 Bruxelles.




>
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 5:26 AM, Maxime Kinet <mkinet at ulb.ac.be>  
> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm setting up  a cluster, made of diskless workstations, booting  
> through NFS. For that purpose I created a copy of the node's  
> filesystem in a /tftpboot directory. That is, I have a full  
> filesytem for each single node : /tftpboot/192.168.1.1, /tftpboot/ 
> 192.168.1.2, /tftpboot/192.168.1.3, etc.
>
> I know that there are several different options to make several  
> clients mounting their filesystems, and that this one might not be  
> the most efficient one, but I choosed that one just because I knew  
> already how to do it. Now everything works fine, except that I would  
> like to spare some diskspace on the master partition. Since each  
> filesystem is around 500 Mb, I quickly reach more than 10Gb just for  
> the /tftpboot directory.
>
> A quick solution I founded is to mount the largests directory (which  
> are the same for each node) of the / (namely /lib and /var) from a  
> separate common directory. Could this cause some problem in the way  
> the node's are working? Is there any other easy/fast way to reduce  
> the amount of data contained in the /tftpboot/192.168.1.* directories?
>
> I also heard about ClusterNFS which would do exactly what I need,  
> but then I would have to start everything from the beggining and I  
> want everything to work as soon as possible.
>
> Thanks a lot for answers/advices,
>
> ------------------
> Maxime Kinet
> Université Libre de Bruxelles
> Physique Statistique et Plasmas, CP 231
> Campus Plaine - Boulevard du Triomphe,
> 1050 Bruxelles.
>
>
>
>
>
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