Cluster Talk Preparation - Day 1
Today in my MAT204 class (trig and such) I wrote down about a page of ideas for my clustering talk which I’ll give on Tuesday (February 8th) at LILUG. Once I got home, I decided to set up a practice node with all the goodies necessary for the talk. The final node will actually be my desktop with the HDDs removed and replaced by one 40 GB that will contain several installations of linux (Debian Sarge.) Anyway, I managed to only install the os (Woody) and dist-upgrade it to Sarge. This took me about an hour (time which I could have spend configuring bind :-( ) because my ethernet cable wasn’t in properly, and I was trying to figure out why the packets were getting lost. :-( After I figured it out, apt-get update & apt-get dist-upgrade worked like a charm.
Tomorrow, I’ll configure bind, dhcpd, tftpd (in that order) and test the network boot. If it works, I’m pretty much done with MPI. OpenMosix will take some more effort, PVM I might skip. Failover is too app specific for me to demonstrate. distcc is VERY simple to set up, I’ll be sure to present it.