[Beowulf] Diskless cluster provisioning/installation

[Novosielski, Ryan]

To each their own, I suppose, but I've never found myself with so much free time managing our equipment that I would've thought it a good idea to have written cluster management software - a duplication of what already exists in several forms - instead of working on something that directly affects my users (more up to date software, performance tuning, etc). The flipside about there being nothing particularly complicated about it is that I don't believe there is a compelling reason to be manually editing DHCP/TFTP configuration files and other tedium. How many unique ways of working on a cluster are there, really, that it's worth giving up that much free labor? If I had the time to write one of these things, I'd probably give it to one of the existing projects in the form of tweaks that would help my use case. Anyway, my two cents.

--
____ *Note: UMDNJ is now Rutgers-Biomedical and Health Sciences*
|| \\UTGERS      |---------------------*O*---------------------
||_// Biomedical | Ryan Novosielski - Senior Technologist
|| \\ and Health | novosirj at rutgers.edu<mailto:novosirj at rutgers.edu>- 973/972.0922 (2x0922)
||  \\  Sciences | OIRT/High Perf & Res Comp - MSB C630, Newark
    `'

On Nov 5, 2015, at 23:49, Stu Midgley <sdm900 at gmail.com<mailto:sdm900 at gmail.com>> wrote:

Write your own.  I personally find all the packaged systems way too
stifling and don't do what you want, so you end up bending how you
want to work.

It is relatively simple to setup pxe booting and network booting from
nfs or lustre or any other shared file system (or just rsync down the
image to a ram disk).

At least then, you have a bash script that you can tune to do what you want.

Once you have a booted image, pdsh is about all you need.


On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Novosielski, Ryan
<novosirj at ca.rutgers.edu<mailto:novosirj at ca.rutgers.edu>> wrote:
Another vote here for Warewulf. Good stuff. Easy to use, but not lacking any features I need.

--
____ *Note: UMDNJ is now Rutgers-Biomedical and Health Sciences*
|| \\UTGERS      |---------------------*O*---------------------
||_// Biomedical | Ryan Novosielski - Senior Technologist
|| \\ and Health | novosirj at rutgers.edu<mailto:novosirj at rutgers.edu> - 973/972.0922 (2x0922)
||  \\  Sciences | OIRT/High Perf & Res Comp - MSB C630, Newark
     `'
________________________________________
From: Beowulf [beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org>] On Behalf Of Vaughn Clinton [vclinton at msn.com<mailto:vclinton at msn.com>]
Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2015 9:40 PM
To: Chris Samuel; beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Diskless cluster provisioning/installation

XCat is long in the tooth now.  I'd take serious look at WareWulf.  I've used WW and was happy with it:

http://warewulf.lbl.gov/trac



From: samuel at unimelb.edu.au<mailto:samuel at unimelb.edu.au>
To: beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2015 10:52:54 +1100
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Diskless cluster provisioning/installation

On Wed, 4 Nov 2015 05:15:10 PM Matthew Wallis wrote:

xCAT is still fairly popular.

This is what we use here on our IBM and Lenovo gear (and previously our SGI
gear too) for statelite (diskless nodes booting RAMdisk with NFS mounts for
certain files & directories that we want to preserve information in such as
GPFS config, Slurm logs, etc).

http://sourceforge.net/p/xcat/wiki/XCAT_Linux_Statelite/

All the best,
Chris
--
Christopher Samuel Senior Systems Administrator
VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au<mailto:samuel at unimelb.edu.au> Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
http://www.vlsci.org.au/ http://twitter.com/vlsci

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--
Dr Stuart Midgley
sdm900 at sdm900.com<mailto:sdm900 at sdm900.com>
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