[Beowulf] Diskless cluster provisioning/installation

[Douglas Eadline]

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

Neither is building a laptop from parts, but I have better things to do.
Yea those damn vendors want to sell me something that saves me
time and can create an open community of users who collectively
help each other resolve issues. Darn. I got fooled again.

--
Doug


>
> 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
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-- 
Doug

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