FW: xCAT Cluster Management SW?

[Nicholas Henke]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 11:44:32 -0700
"Egan Ford" <egan at sense.net> wrote:

> It's an extremely long story.  IANS:
> 
> 1.  xCAT was/is written as a free "open source"-like cluster 
> management solution for IBM customers.  "open source"-like 
> refers to xCAT shipping with source.
> 2.  xcat.org was setup as an IBM customer peer community for support.
> 3.  xcat.org was shutdown because it did not follow IBM web 
> guidelines.
> 4.  xcat.org content moved to AW, with OSS parts of xCAT moved to USC.
> 5.  xcat.org now in compliance and will be up shortly.
> 
> xCAT is still freely available.

Is this still going to happen? I have spent the last 3 days trying to
get the latest release of xcat working. Here are the problems we ran
into ( BTW -- we have installed 2 eariler versions of xcat with minimal
problems. ) It would seem that the latest xcat.org debauchle has really
screwed the pooch.

1) there is no updated Howto to be found. Everythink included in the
tarballs seems to point to xcat.org. Some updated documentation can
really help.
2) There are several files/programs missing, with no instructions on how
to find them or build them. Examples: fping, mpcli, etc.
3) VERY lacking documentation on any of the hardware shipped with the
IBM clusters. Can you _please_ include information on the ESP/ELP
terminal servers? We had to spend 2 days on the phone with Equinox to
just get the IP address reset on an ESP. It is not that tough to do, but
again some documentation would be nice.
4) The IBM RSA/ASMA adapter sucks. Sorry guys, but a piece of hardware
that is supposed to provide remote administration should _not_ fail 25%
of the time. It is really tiresome to have to dump power on and RSA
adapter just to get it to work.

So to anyone thinking about using xcat -- 'NOOO', or at least until Egan
and IBM can figure out what is going on.

Nic
-- 
Nicholas Henke
Linux Cluster Systems Programmer
Liniac Project - Univ. of Pennsylvania