[Beowulf] Diskless cluster provisioning/installation

[Stu Midgley]

It really isn't that hard.  Sounds like you've listen to a lot of vendor spiels.

On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 12:00 AM, Novosielski, Ryan
<novosirj at ca.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> 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- 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> 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> 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 - 973/972.0922 (2x0922)
>
> ||  \\  Sciences | OIRT/High Perf & Res Comp - MSB C630, Newark
>
>      `'
>
> ________________________________________
>
> From: Beowulf [beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Vaughn Clinton
> [vclinton at msn.com]
>
> Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2015 9:40 PM
>
> To: Chris Samuel; 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
>
> To: 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 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



-- 
Dr Stuart Midgley
sdm900 at sdm900.com