On Wed, 6 Feb 2008, Daniel Hagerty wrote:
Scott Ehrlich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
I'm looking at building a small cluster of disk-less 1 or 2U servers and will
probably use CentOS 5.
It's not 1990, so the immediate question is "what benefit is going
diskless giving you?"
Its the convinience of having only one image to keep up to date, of being
able to make universal changes with a single edit, of knowing that none of
the systems was out of sync, the ability to swap OS with a single edit
to /etc/dhcpd.conf etc. Of course, it is nice to have local swap
and /tmp, the convinience comes from effective statelessness which a local
disk used only for swap and /tmp does not vitiate.
I understand that cfengine is an alternative, but not always a superior
alternative. In our case the amount of ethernet traffic from program
loading is trivial compared to data I/O, so there is little benefit to
us in keeping /usr local. Scott may be in a similar position.
Daniel Feenberg
Back in the day when diskless was popular, disks were insanely
expensive, and several of the canonical diskless platforms
(e.g. sun3/60s or whatever that particular pizzabox model # was) could
actually do NFS writes faster than a local disk (provided the NFS
server could keep up).
Neither of these properties are true anymore.
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