Rocks (was Re: [Beowulf] hpl size problems)

[Chris Samuel]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 09:40 pm, Joe Landman wrote:

> Note:  I can and will say nice things about Rocks to people who ask BTW.

Just remember that the Rocks 4.0 installer on the management node will 
silently wipe all partition tables on any and all disks it can get its grubby 
little hands on, without asking and *before* it asks you how you want to 
partition your now blank drives.  I don't believe it's documented anywhere 
either (that I could find anyway), and Google doesn't appear to show anything 
about it.

If you do get caught by this, I can thoroughly recommend gpart, at:

http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/

Which is fortunate as the people who had purchased the cluster originally 
hadn't been able to afford a backup system to go with it, and I had naively 
assumed it would act like the usual Anaconda installer and ask me what I 
wanted to do with the RAID arrays.

Also, Rocks suffers from being a RHEL^H^H^H^HProminent North American Linux 
Distribution (PNALD) rebuild (via CentOS), it's missing the same useful 
filesystems that R.., er, PNALD, does, such as XFS, which leaves it a bit 
hamstrung in my view.

It also has this wacky idea that on the compute nodes you should have a 
small /tmp and a large partition of another name /state/partition1 which, 
IIRC, has the same permissions as /tmp. Of course this is fairly easily 
changed through their XML config files for the compute nodes!

cheers,
Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel - (03)9925 4751 - VPAC Deputy Systems Manager
 Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing http://www.vpac.org/
 Bldg 91, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia

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