diskless nodes? (was Re: Xbox clusters?)

[W Bauske]

Velocet wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 03:04:22AM -0600, W Bauske's all...
> > Velocet wrote:
> > > Does NO ONE use diskless clusters?
> > >
> >
> > I ran them around 8-10 years ago.
> 
> Must have been hell on 10Mbps networks!: )
> 

I had FDDI, not quite so painful although I've done diskless on 10Mb too.
These were $30K workstations. I could do more work on a single Athlon or 
P4 now as that cluster back then. ($500 now)

> > One thing I liked about diskless was I could edit the files that
> > controlled the node even if it wasn't running. Can be handy sometimes.
> 
> as I said, for downed nodes, definitely. And most of my changes to the OS are
> to a single image loaded by all the nodes, I forgot to add. (Hmm glaring
> omission, my point before about downed nodes doenst make sense without this
> statement). There are only 3 unique files per node, and we use a special
> mounting setup that mounts these unique files overtop of the default
> disk image into a ramdisk at boot. Just so flexible and elegant.
> 
> > Of course, with kickstart, you add customizations in the kickstart
> > file and re-install so it's not so far off.
> 
> How often do you reboot and suffer 3-4 min of install time?
> 

For me, once every 6 months or so. Then again, I only use one OS so
I don't have much need to swap things around the way it sounds like
you're doing. 

Call it a coffee break.

Wes