On 16 Apr 2008, at 4:11 pm, stephen mulcahy wrote:
Jon Aquilina wrote:
desktop interface at least for the master node. then the others can
pxe boot from the master. i know this becomes problematic the large
the cluster. for now i think starting like this would be good to
have a distro for people such as myself who are quite new to
clustering.
If you're committed to rolling your own distro and joining the likes
of those listed at http://lwn.net/Distributions/ then I'd recommend
Debian as a good starting point.
But I'd echo Jakob's comments - I don't see much value in building a
"cluster distribution". It would be far more valuable to document
how to install a standard distro on a cluster - either your KUbuntu,
standard Ubuntu or any distro of your choice (I keep meaning to do
this myself for work we've done with Debian in the past but the time
to do so keeps getting away from me).
I agree entirely. Rather than doing the full-blown custom
distribution thing, which is a huge amount of effort, what is somewhat
easier is just to maintain your own local package repository for
things which you want to maintain separately from the distribution.
You can then use the distribution's normal tools to keep everything up
to date, and you decide which bits you want to maintain for yourself,
and which you want to leave to the upstream distro (as much as
possible, in my opinion). The way we do it here is as follows:
1) The cluster's OS is plain ol' Debian.
2) We have a standalone server which mirrors ftp.uk.debian.org
3) On that same server we run the package "debarchiver" which is a
pretty painless way of building your own debian package repository.
4) The /etc/apt/sources.list file on our cluster nodes contains three
entries; the local mirror, security.debian.org, and our debarchiver
repository.
5) If I want a package that deviates from the normal Debian one (say,
I want to backport something newer from lenny, or a custom package of
local software) I can use standard Debian tools to build it (dpkg-
buildpackage) and upload it into our local repository (e.g. dput
sanger-etch some-fancy-thing.changes )
6) The final piece of the puzzle is that we use cfengine to make sure
the right packages are installed on the right machines at the right
versions, and to maintain the configuration files for everything,
including apt.
Of course, part of the reason all this works so well for us is that
three members of the team are full Debian Developers, so it was a way
of working we were already used to.
The nice thing is that in fact, we don't just use this infrastructure
for the cluster, but actually use it for every single Debian system in
the Institute, be it a cluster node, a desktop, a standalone server or
a high availability failover cluster.
Tim
--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
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