Diskless cluster soon...

[rogerdugans]

Some news on my recent problems:
I got a "new" heatsink form another forum member today (second OC member I've met) and worked on my last offline rig;
cpu and mobo were fine- whew!- but the hard drive is dead.
So I dropped a 900 and got the 1000 back up, gaining about 400 mhz.

And I have a rig that runs, but no hdd.
So I will be installing Linux on something in the next week, to be the Cluster Server, and then setting up a diskless machine, hopefully.

After I have read through all the stuff TC wrote up here

With luck, it will be going next weekend......

 

[DanFraser]

I am thinking of a diskless machine... my favourite brand of mobo can network boot... is that possible in XP?

 

[TC]

I'll try to finish the how-to later this evening.

 

[rogerdugans]

Update:

The Cluster Server has RedHat installed and is currently crunching away. I have some more configuration to do tomorrow, but that should be no big deal- especially with the *nix folks around here!

I'll grab a floppy from work and with luck either Thursday or Friday I'll have the first node crunching.

 

[Yodums]

Awsome D. Has anyone else tried a diskless cluster? If so, your thoughts?

 

[rogerdugans]

A couple of others have talked about it, and had some plans to set one up.......

Hopefully a few more people will give this a shot: the more brain power we have optimizing the server and clients the better!

 

[Greg M]

I knew a guy that was a diskless cluster...

 

[TC]

I knew a guy that was a diskless cluster...

LOL, to quote Morpheus "oops, my brain just hit a bad sector"

 

[David]

Some of the folding guys have got a set of diskless clients up and running. Gator wrote up a howto on it. Its basically a modified version of LTSP (www.ltsp.org) which means only one of the PCs need a hard disk.

Stymee has a 5 machine cluster going: YattaMonster Jr.

David

 

[rogerdugans]

For anyone else working on a cluster:

Working at home today , so I had the chance to mess with my cluster a bit.

I did have a problem with the boot floppy:

all the linux distros I've tried have used the rtl8139 driver for my cheap nics, so I used that image for the boot floppy- and it didn't work.

I tried all kinds of things, including testing the server with a pxe enabled laptop- server ok.

After exchanging email with TC, and getting some more ideas from him, I finally looked around a bit more and found a model specific driver!!!! DOH!

Works perfectly.
Lesson: look for the closest fit for your nic driver! If there is a model-specific one use it, not a generic chipset driver.

TC has done most of the rest of the work, so I should be able to edit a few text files later and get things running.

 

[DanFraser]

Can this be done with XP though? as in store OSs on a drive on the server and get the clients to boot into XP from there?

 

[TC]

Can this be done with XP though? as in store OSs on a drive on the server and get the clients to boot into XP from there?

Sure - it's called windows terminal server, available with windows advanced server.

 

[bbdd]

Can this be done with XP though? as in store OSs on a drive on the server and get the clients to boot into XP from there?

no.

from poking around, i found that you could remote boot several old versions of windows (3.1, 95, 98), but these methods all required a hard drive anyway. this defeats our purpose of lowering costs. this technique was used mainly by schools who needed "fresh" installs of the os between every boot-up for lab machines.

the only current method similar is using windows terminal server or citrix server, but even these are not the same as the cluster since the processing for all the clients is handled on one master server and not broken down among the individual machines.

doh! TC always beats me by 2 seconds! or 5 minutes in this case.

 

[TC]

no.

from poking around, i found that you could remote boot several old versions of windows (3.1, 95, 98), but these methods all required a hard drive anyway. this defeats our purpose of lowering costs. this technique was used mainly by schools who needed "fresh" installs of the os between every boot-up for lab machines.

the only current method similar is using windows terminal server or citrix server, but even these are not the same as the cluster since the processing for all the clients is handled on one master server and not broken down among the individual machines.

doh! TC always beats me by 2 seconds! or 5 minutes in this case.

You pointed out some good things though. It can be done, but it doesn't work the way we want for this application.

 

[rogerdugans]

Update time: I've had some problems getting this thing going, and they aren't over yet!

I managed to get a differnet version of the ltsp client os than the one TC has, so the scripts he has are not working quite right.
Thats my story and I'm sticking to it, anyway

But I have a node connected and crunching, although I am NOT certain if it is crunching on its own yet, or using the server resources to crunch and just reporting it. I'll know for sure in the the morning.

 

[rogerdugans]

Update:
ITS RUNNING PERFECTLY!

I decided to reinstall the os on the server this morning, as I had messed up a lot of the files and scripts involved with my mistakes, and from the first boot things went MUCH better this time!

The final problem I had was a file permission error that was fixed by un-commenting one line in a conf file.

I've lost quite a few wu in the last few days messing this all up but I should be making up for it in the nest few days by having two crunchers where I had one.

 

[David]

Update:
ITS RUNNING PERFECTLY!

I decided to reinstall the os on the server this morning, as I had messed up a lot of the files and scripts involved with my mistakes, and from the first boot things went MUCH better this time!

The final problem I had was a file permission error that was fixed by un-commenting one line in a conf file.

I've lost quite a few wu in the last few days messing this all up but I should be making up for it in the nest few days by having two crunchers where I had one.

Well Done!

We expect to see the team production massively boosted now

David