From: Jeff Squyres on Tuesday, November 22, 2005 5:24 AM > > I got some feedback from an attendee at SC about OSCAR. He makes the > following suggestions: > > > 1. First is due to the nature of the disk boot model. There's no low > > level way to know why a node doesn't boot. If one doesn't come up > > then putting a monitor on it is required. I don't know what you would > > do about it. It's pretty low level. Finding a third-party solution > > and bundling it in would be nice if possible.
Some sort of remote console access is needed. Could be as simple as a serial line with BIOS console redirect, one of those KVM-over-IP thingies, or SOL (Serial Over LAN, an IPMI 2.0 feature). At the end of the day, hardware must provide a part of the answer. > > 2. The problem that can be resolved more easily is the post-install > > configuration. Oscar is really good at the initial install but try > > doing something like building the latest kernel from source and > > distributing it to the nodes. It's not easy. We have a lot of things > > that need to be installed from source. What I do is chroot to the > > image, make the changes and do a cpushimage. It works but it's not > > oscar friendly. It would be nice if I could do something more in the > > GUI. I understand that updating the image is going to be text and > > manual but I don't believe the gui lets me push the updated image. > > Keep in mind that I don't want to reformat the disk every time. I may > > just want to push a single updated binary out. I don't know that this is "not oscar friendly" as we provide the tools, just not the gui. But, should be eminently doable from that spiffy new portal--well, it is directly doable from the current portal's C3 tools page, but a more purpose-built variant to push/get an image would be useful. We need the localboot/install magic for PXEBOOT manageable there, too. > > 3. Also, ganglia is a nice monitor but it would be nice to be able to > > do things like reboot a node from the gui. I know it can be done at > > the command line. I don't see this as a ganglia feature--as a portal feature, this would be fine as would the above item. > > Basically, if there's going to be a gui it should do more. If not > > that's ok too but then what's the value added from oscar. Ganglia is not a gui... It's just a display. -- dnl My comments represent my opinions, not those of Intel Corporation. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today Register for a JBoss Training Course. Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005. For more info visit: http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_idv28&alloc_id845&op=click _______________________________________________ Oscar-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oscar-devel
