[Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes

[Mark Hahn]

> > I personally like the idea of putting one admin server in each rack.
> >they don't have to be fancy servers, by any means.
> 
> *LOLOL*  At first I was guilty of the one things I am always getting on the
> other guys for-thinking too literally. I was going to say there is no room in
> the rack.  Of course, the server would not have to even be on the same
> side of the room.  :)

no, I really meant to put one admin server (1u is fine) in each rack.
I'd already have a Gb switch and possibly a high-speed interconnect 
leaf in the rack if possible.  a modular approach like this cuts 
down on cabling and out-of-rack traffic.

> in on a temporary basis.  tftp was a problem because of xinetd.  We bought 1024

why would you run tftp from xinetd?  generally I don't see the point to 
inetd anymore - it was a cool hack from days when you wanted lots of 
daemons reachable, but didn't want them in memory.  I usually remove it.

> >> So now to figure out my next step.  I will need local space for logs and data/temp data files.
> >
> > why would you want logs local?
> 
> We have huge data sets, huge scratch data, huge library data (travel time sets)
> and I worry about network traffic.

if your logs are enough to interfere with other traffic, something's wrong.
but perhaps you don't look at your logs as much as I do (which is why 
I want them coalesced.)