[Beowulf] DCC (debian cluster components)

[Paul English]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, John Hearns wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 11:33 -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> > > Dear Debianized beowulfers or beowulfiezed Debian users,
> > > 
> > > Does any one has experience with 
> > > http://www.irb.hr/en/cir/projects/dcc/
> > > which recently was released?
> > > 
> > > Project Goals
> > > 
> > > We expect to integrate some existing technologies (like LDAP, System
> > > Installation Suite,
> > 
> > Seems strange that they haven't chosen FAI (Fully Automated Installer).
> > As an aside, there was a poster about FAI up outside the cluster
> > developer's room at FOSDEM last weekend.
> 
> Is FAI being loved by somebody at this point?  There was a time a few
> years ago where it seemed to be lying fallow (although as always I could
> be mistaken about that).  Toolsets like that usually need a fairly
> active and energetic human to care for them, if not several...

The list is alive, and has posts, etc. I did not have a great deal of luck 
getting help with my questions and the process is (if anything) more raw 
than Kickstart. I gave it a good try for several months because many of 
our machines are debian, but in the end I gave up.

For clustering purposes, ROCKS has been much more useful - quick, useful 
responses on the mailing list, and a lot more of the lower-level crud is 
hidden with simpler utilities.

For general network installs (workstations, general purpose servers), 
Kickstart was far easier to use and find answers for than FAI, although it 
could use some of the abstraction that ROCKS has. 

In the "modern" era of PXE, on "most networks" adding new machines 
with specific configurations could be done with a single command or GUI. 
We're not there yet. :-)

Paul