[Beowulf] Diskless cluster provisioning/installation

[Novosielski, Ryan]

Yeah, I can see how an e-mail where I specifically mentioned it’s not hard but tedious, possibly not a good cost/benefit, and that there is free software out there — that I’ve been using — that does a good job could cause one to jump to the conclusion that I’ve been sold a bill of goods by a vendor. We’re each entitled to our opinion without that kind of snark, I have to imagine.

> On Nov 6, 2015, at 11:31 AM, Stu Midgley <sdm900 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It really isn't that hard.  Sounds like you've listen to a lot of vendor spiels.
> 
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 12:00 AM, Novosielski, Ryan
> <novosirj at ca.rutgers.edu> wrote:
>> To each their own, I suppose, but I've never found myself with so much free
>> time managing our equipment that I would've thought it a good idea to have
>> written cluster management software - a duplication of what already exists
>> in several forms - instead of working on something that directly affects my
>> users (more up to date software, performance tuning, etc). The flipside
>> about there being nothing particularly complicated about it is that I don't
>> believe there is a compelling reason to be manually editing DHCP/TFTP
>> configuration files and other tedium. How many unique ways of working on a
>> cluster are there, really, that it's worth giving up that much free labor?
>> If I had the time to write one of these things, I'd probably give it to one
>> of the existing projects in the form of tweaks that would help my use case.
>> Anyway, my two cents.
>> 
>> --
>> ____ *Note: UMDNJ is now Rutgers-Biomedical and Health Sciences*
>> || \\UTGERS      |---------------------*O*---------------------
>> ||_// Biomedical | Ryan Novosielski - Senior Technologist
>> || \\ and Health | novosirj at rutgers.edu- 973/972.0922 (2x0922)
>> ||  \\  Sciences | OIRT/High Perf & Res Comp - MSB C630, Newark
>>    `'
>> 
>> On Nov 5, 2015, at 23:49, Stu Midgley <sdm900 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Write your own.  I personally find all the packaged systems way too
>> stifling and don't do what you want, so you end up bending how you
>> want to work.
>> 
>> It is relatively simple to setup pxe booting and network booting from
>> nfs or lustre or any other shared file system (or just rsync down the
>> image to a ram disk).
>> 
>> At least then, you have a bash script that you can tune to do what you want.
>> 
>> Once you have a booted image, pdsh is about all you need.
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Novosielski, Ryan
>> <novosirj at ca.rutgers.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> Another vote here for Warewulf. Good stuff. Easy to use, but not lacking any
>> features I need.
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> ____ *Note: UMDNJ is now Rutgers-Biomedical and Health Sciences*
>> 
>> || \\UTGERS      |---------------------*O*---------------------
>> 
>> ||_// Biomedical | Ryan Novosielski - Senior Technologist
>> 
>> || \\ and Health | novosirj at rutgers.edu - 973/972.0922 (2x0922)
>> 
>> ||  \\  Sciences | OIRT/High Perf & Res Comp - MSB C630, Newark
>> 
>>     `'
>> 
>> ________________________________________
>> 
>> From: Beowulf [beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Vaughn Clinton
>> [vclinton at msn.com]
>> 
>> Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2015 9:40 PM
>> 
>> To: Chris Samuel; beowulf at beowulf.org
>> 
>> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Diskless cluster provisioning/installation
>> 
>> 
>> XCat is long in the tooth now.  I'd take serious look at WareWulf.  I've
>> used WW and was happy with it:
>> 
>> 
>> http://warewulf.lbl.gov/trac
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> From: samuel at unimelb.edu.au
>> 
>> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
>> 
>> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2015 10:52:54 +1100
>> 
>> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Diskless cluster provisioning/installation
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, 4 Nov 2015 05:15:10 PM Matthew Wallis wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> xCAT is still fairly popular.
>> 
>> 
>> This is what we use here on our IBM and Lenovo gear (and previously our SGI
>> 
>> gear too) for statelite (diskless nodes booting RAMdisk with NFS mounts for
>> 
>> certain files & directories that we want to preserve information in such as
>> 
>> GPFS config, Slurm logs, etc).
>> 
>> 
>> http://sourceforge.net/p/xcat/wiki/XCAT_Linux_Statelite/
>> 
>> 
>> All the best,
>> 
>> Chris
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> Christopher Samuel Senior Systems Administrator
>> 
>> VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
>> 
>> Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
>> 
>> http://www.vlsci.org.au/ http://twitter.com/vlsci
>> 
>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Dr Stuart Midgley
>> sdm900 at sdm900.com
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Dr Stuart Midgley
> sdm900 at sdm900.com

____ *Note: UMDNJ is now Rutgers-Biomedical and Health Sciences*
|| \\UTGERS      |---------------------*O*---------------------
||_// Biomedical | Ryan Novosielski - Senior Technologist
|| \\ and Health | novosirj at rutgers.edu - 973/972.0922 (2x0922)
||  \\  Sciences | OIRT/High Perf & Res Comp - MSB C630, Newark
     `'