On Tue, 10 Feb 1998, Tim Sailer wrote: > The powers-that-be around here have almost decided to scrap Slowaris x86 > for the 200 machine PPro compouter farm, and go with Linux... I need to > convince them to use Debian and not RH. They want to be able to > configure 1 machine and mirror the setup to each machine in the farm, > without having to go to each of the remaining 199 and configure it by > hand. Someone told them that RH made this easy, and no other dist could > do it!
Other people have given some excellent advice already. I may be doing something like this in the near future, in a much smaller scale (20+2 node farm aiming at 4+ Gflop/s). Reading the documentation, bootp seems like a good option for network configuration detailts, but, as Craig Sanders pointed out, not a very dependable one. In a more "fixed" situation, it seems better to statically configure the machines using smart scripts... I don't know if this is what you are up to, but you may want to check out Beowulf's home page (shows up in Yahoo! rather easily). It's RH based, but I don't see anything there that's Red Hat specific. There are a couple of kernel patches and and bunch of rpm's. I recall there's PVM and MPP. Drake Diedrich has already packaged PVM and dqs. If I ever get the time, I'd like to try to make a Debian version of the requiered packages. Marcelo PS: What I'm still pondering is exactly how RH "does this easy". Last time I poked at RH, it didn't had anything to automate this kind of task. PPS: Since neither RH nor Debian actually have anything built-in for this task, Debian is still a better choice: several times ppl in the developer's list have expressed interest in further developing Deity into this direction. I know this doesn't buy you anything right now, but it may be worth mentioning. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .