[Beowulf] diskless cluster questions

[Ashley Pittman]

On 5 Jul 2010, at 06:36, Holden Dapenor wrote:

> How does diskless clustering work for those aspects of the OS that need to be unique for each node?

Differently for each distribution.

> For instance, network configuration and hostfiles need to be specified somewhere

hostfiles are the same, network configuration including hostname can be done by dhcp.

> but if all nodes boot the same root, then where is this information stored? 

This is not mandated by diskless configuration, you may choose to share / ro between clients and have a rw copy of /var for each client or you may choose to have an entire fs tree for each client.

Another option might be to use fuse although I don't have much experience of that myself, it's basically the same but each client would have a copy-on-write version of /var and /etc to allow them to write to files in these directories.

Ashley.

-- 

Ashley Pittman, Bath, UK.

Padb - A parallel job inspection tool for cluster computing
http://padb.pittman.org.uk