[Beowulf] How do people keep track of computers in your cluster(s)?

[Carsten Aulbert]

Hi all,

we are currently looking into the problem, how to keep track of
computers which we are going to buy. On the one hand there are the
standard tools to monitor a running cluster like ganglia, nagios,
zenoss, ... but these are - to my understanding - just for monitoring
the current status.

However, I would like to have something where we have something like a
large table about the hardware in question. In there information like

* vendor
* serial number
* MAC addresses (eth0, eth1,..., IPMI, RAID,...)
* maybe even firmware versions and serial numbers of exchangeable
internal hardware (hard disks)
* basically all physical information of the box

another table should hold the current setup, i.e. a mapping between the
hardware and the "logical" setup, e.g.

Hardware box number #1234 from above table has in the current setup the
following...

* hostname
* IP addresses
* running services
* ...

And finally, another table where special problems, like memory errors
and the like can be entered.

I know this sounds just like three medium sized SQL tables, but at least
I wanted to ask what people are using if more than a single person is
working on the cluster. One person can probably do this with a simple
text file and a set of papers in a filing cabinet.

Thanks a lot for any answers

Carsten