[Beowulf] Introduction and question

[Chris Samuel]

On Thursday, 28 February 2019 12:41:57 AM PST Bill Broadley wrote:

> * avoid installing/fixing things with vi/apt-get/dpkg/yum/dnf, use ansible
>   whenever possible.  Eventually you'll have to reinstall and it's painful
>   to manually apply months of changes.

Another approach is to build a RAM disk image that gets booted on each node, 
and then you only make changes to that image.   That way you know your nodes 
are in lockstep. 

At ${JOB-2} we used xCAT for that with its "statelite" method (so we could 
have some persistent state for things like GPFS config info on an NFS share), 
at ${JOB-1} we had an image on Lustre that was updated via some scripts from a 
master image that was kept in git, and where I am now we use Ansible to build 
boot images for our various systems.

All the best!
Chris
-- 
  Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Berkeley, CA, USA