[Beowulf] need for an advice on nfs and diskless clients

[Maxime Kinet]

Hi,

I'm setting up  a cluster, made of diskless workstations, booting  
through NFS. For that purpose I created a copy of the node's  
filesystem in a /tftpboot directory. That is, I have a full filesytem  
for each single node : /tftpboot/192.168.1.1, /tftpboot/192.168.1.2, / 
tftpboot/192.168.1.3, etc.

I know that there are several different options to make several  
clients mounting their filesystems, and that this one might not be the  
most efficient one, but I choosed that one just because I knew already  
how to do it. Now everything works fine, except that I would like to  
spare some diskspace on the master partition. Since each filesystem is  
around 500 Mb, I quickly reach more than 10Gb just for the /tftpboot  
directory.

A quick solution I founded is to mount the largests directory (which  
are the same for each node) of the / (namely /lib and /var) from a  
separate common directory. Could this cause some problem in the way  
the node's are working? Is there any other easy/fast way to reduce the  
amount of data contained in the /tftpboot/192.168.1.* directories?

I also heard about ClusterNFS which would do exactly what I need, but  
then I would have to start everything from the beggining and I want  
everything to work as soon as possible.

Thanks a lot for answers/advices,

------------------
Maxime Kinet
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Physique Statistique et Plasmas, CP 231
Campus Plaine - Boulevard du Triomphe,
1050 Bruxelles.




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