ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter, September 26th. 2001 (fwd)

[Eugene Leitl]

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 14:25:04 +0200
From: Antoine Brenner <abrenner at alinka.com>
To: clustering at alinka.com
Subject: ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter, September 26th. 2001
Resent-Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 14:25:08 +0200 (CEST)
Resent-From: clustering at alinka.com


The ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter,

Wednesday, September the 26th. 2001

Dear readers, I am happy to send you this week's edition of
clustering at alinka.com

clustering at alinka.com is a free weekly e-mail newsletter on linux
clustering. It provides a summary of the weekly activity in
mailing-lists relative to linux clustering (such as beowulf,
linux virtual server or linux-ha) and general clustering news.
For more information about ALINKA, see: http://www.alinka.com


News from the High Performance world, by Dr Laurent Gatineau
(lgatineau at alinka.com)
======================================================================
Tips and tricks from the Beowulf mailing list
========
* Delcides  Flávio  de Sousa   Jr. [m1] is    wondering which kind  of
  configuration he needs to start its beowulf cluster. As Greg Lindahl
  [m2] try to answer to its questions, it depends on applications.
[m1] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001304.html
[m2] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001306.html

* Shane Canon [m1] has problem to configure linpack, Greg Lindahl [m2]
  and Patrick Geoffray [m3] explained how to set the problem size.
[m1] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001305.html
[m2] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001311.html
[m3] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001313.html

* Jalal Haddad  [m1]  is looking  for cheap dual  P4 motherboard, Joel
  Jaeggli [m2] answered that   actually the only available  chipset is
  the  intel  860 which is    expensive.   Ron  Chen   [m3] gave   two
  links [1,2] where Dual P4 and Dual Athlon are compared, showing that
  performances depends  on the compiler and  the code [m4].  About PCI
  bus speed, Greg Lindahl [m5] posted a link [3] where some comparison
  have been done.
[1] http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?article_id=40000189
[2] http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?article_id=45000195
[3] http://conservativecomputer.com/myrinet/perf.html
[m1] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001288.html
[m2] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001289.html
[m3] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001295.html
[m4] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001302.html
[m5] http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2001-September/001308.html


News from MOSIX mailing list by Benoit des Ligneris
<bligneri at physique.usherb.ca>
=====================================================================
* Jame Troup ask for support [m1] in order to use Mosix in the Linux
  Terminal Server Project [1]. An old debate about development of mosix
  for the ``last'' linux kernel arise.
  Only last versions of Mosix are developped and patches are not ported
  to old version. As stated by Thomas Webb [m2] it's not good for a
  production environment !

[m1] http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/month-arch/2001/Sep/0090.html
[m2] http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/month-arch/2001/Sep/0095.html
[1]  http://www.ltsp.org/

* Discussion lauched by John Strange about GFS + Mosix [m1]. One of the problem
  was mexecd that did not work on recent Mosix kernels. Paul Mundt told [m2]
  that he has almost all rewritten for recent mosix. Then Jacob Gorn Hansen
  [m3] says that CODA/intermezzo will surely have better performance.

[m1] http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/month-arch/2001/Sep/0102.html
[m2] http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/month-arch/2001/Sep/0102.html
[m3] http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/month-arch/2001/Sep/0121.html

* Tim Chipman asked [m1] for a simple queue management for mosix cluster.
  John Strange [m2] suggested Gnu Queue [1] or Sun Grid [2] and lots of other
  posters gave advices for a "home made" solution but nothing concrete and
  really mosix-specific.

[m1] http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/month-arch/2001/Sep/0103.html
[m2] http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/month-arch/2001/Sep/0104.html
[1]  http://bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu/~wkrebs/queue.html
[2]  http://www.sun.com/software/gridware/



News from the High Availability world
======================================================================
DRBD devel by Guillaume GIMENEZ (ggimenez at alinka.com)
========
* Martin Bene posted a patch [m1] to solve some troubles. it applies
against drbd 0.61-pre2 and is useful for redhat users.
[m1] http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/3756/0/6698522/


Linux-HA dev by Rached Ben Mustapha (rached at alinka.com)
========
* Alan Robertson proposed [m1] that dependencies on resources be
  implemented in future versions of linux-ha software.
[m1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ha-dev&m=99980244716915&w=2


Linux-HA by Rached Ben Mustapha (rached at alinka.com)
========
* Jean-Yves Bouet asked [m1] what was the role of job of each thread
  in heartbeat. Alan Robertson replied [m2] this:

  master control process: read requests to send messages from a FIFO,
          and sends them to the master status proces
  Master status process, tracks status of nodes, initiates takeovers,
          handles heartbeat protocol, etc.
  Each medium declared in the ha.cf file has a read and a write process.

[m1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ha&m=100141586826041&w=2
[m2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ha&m=100142758208102&w=2


LVS by Rached Ben Mustapha (rached at alinka.com)
========
* malalon at poczta.onet.pl asked [m1] what was the problem with testing
  a NAT-based service, with rr scheduling. Joseph Mack replied [m2]
  that the recommended method to test lvs was with telnet.

* Dmitry Dan Brovkovich asked [m3] why trying to telnet to the VIP
  resulted in an inactive connection, and the client not receiving
  anything. Joseph Mack replied [m4] that the realserver probably
  didn't have its root set properly to the client.

[m1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=100141845402872&w=2
[m2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=100141983407703&w=2
[m3] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=100108131816446&w=2
[m4] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=100115505406875&w=2



News on the Filesystems front
======================================================================
Coda by Ludovic Ishiomin (lishiomin at alinka.com)
========
* Jan Harkes posted a patch specific to Coda kernel code on Linux that makes
  Coda client be able to use other filesystem than ext2 [1m].
* Phil Nelson gave information about Coda on Solaris 8 [2m].
* Jan Harkes posted comments about Coda and Intermezzo [3m].

[1m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0808.html
[2m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0807.html
[3m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0811.html

Intermezzo by Ludovic Ishiomin (lishiomin at alinka.com)
========
* Shirish Phatak posted status about Reiserfs support with Intermezzo [1m].
[1m] http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/8077/0/6666780/

JFS by Ludovic Ishiomin (lishiomin at alinka.com)
========
* Steve Best announced JFS 1.0.5 [1m].
* Dave Kleikamp posted a patch to the latest release of JFS [2m].
* Anthony Liu confirmed that this drop won't compile with 2.4.10 kernel because
  of major VM changes [3m].
[1m] http://oss.software.ibm.com/pipermail/jfs-discussion/2001-September/000591.html
[2m] http://oss.software.ibm.com/pipermail/jfs-discussion/2001-September/000593.html
[3m] http://oss.software.ibm.com/pipermail/jfs-discussion/2001-September/000602.html

XFS by Ludovic Ishiomin (lishiomin at alinka.com)
========
* There was a long thread about mainstream kernel inclusion of XFS [1m].
[1m] http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0109/msg00486.html
     and the followings


News on other cluster related topics
======================================================================
Linux Cluster by Bruno Muller (bmuller at alinka.com)
========
* Lars Marowsky-Bree announced the Linux Kongress 2001 Clustering
  Workshop[m1].
[m1] http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-cluster/2001-09/msg00011.html

LVM by Bruno Muller (bmuller at alinka.com)
=====
* AJ Lewis posted a patch to configure LVM 1.0.1-rc2 [m1].
[m1] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-September/008936.html


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