Ok... I'm starting a rather ambitious project, and perhaps it's too ambitious!
I'm having a hard time putting it into non-confusing words, for some reason,
I can picture it in my head, but describing it to a mailing list is harder
than I thought!

What I'd like to setup is a compile farm/cluster, using two of my existing
machines.  The number will eventually grow, but my wife won't let me bring
my old computers out of storage in this tiny apartment. :)

I'd like to be able to compile customized Gentoo systems (perhaps for use
on LiveCD's, or available for Etherboot), but build them all from the same set
of sources.  I have a computer setup running Gentoo (very well except for some
minor problems like the old mplayer issue that isn't fixed yet, and some
perl wierdness that is probably due to the recent changes), and I want to use it
to bootstrap the rest of my machines.

The problem is, none of the machines are the same, the network is 100%
heterogeneous, but all are X86 based so far, so it's not going to be cross-
compiling per-se (although that functionality would be rather nice).

The machine I'm running now is running an OpenMosix kernel.  I'm assuming it's
working well, but with only one machine in my cluster, it's hard to know for
sure.  What I'd like to do is setup a LiveCD for my wife's computer, so that
when it's booted off that CD it becomes part of my cluster, and it's power can
be used to compile everything (well, except for those things that don't compile
across the network properly, like X for example).

Is what I want to do possible, and if so, can someone give me some pointers or
help on where to start?  If possible, I'd like to minimize the amount of
duplication, but I'm also not sure how possible that is.  I'm pretty sure I
could do something like this using chroot and just having separate directories
setup, complete, for each machine.  The problem I see with that, besides the
huge amount of duplication, is that the directories will probably be too big
to fit onto CD, and will have a lot of unnecessary stuff for running.

I hope this question wasn't too obscure, if clarification is necessary please
feel free to ask (either through the ML or private mail).
Thanks for everyone's help!
Adam

--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list

Reply via email to