Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Building A Remote Cluster With Storm Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the looking-for-suggestions dept.

b0nk3d asks: "Hi, I work at a computer lab and would like to set up a remote login cluster. I have 4 Pentium Pro and I'm running Storm Linux on them. Do you think it'd be efficient to do a load balancing schema or a process sharing cluster? Also are there any recommended distributed file systems that would work well with small 2-6 gig drives that these machines have so that I could create a virtual volume?"

4 comments

  1. Re:duh. by Zurk · · Score: 1

    err..i meant CODA not CORBA. shoot me for being stupid. :)

  2. What's a Remote Login Cluster? by InitZero · · Score: 2

    Pardon my ignorance but what is a remote login cluster?

    Are you just looking to balance shell accounts across multiple nodes? If that's the case, set one node up as the NFS server serving the home directories. Set up DNS such that shell.wherever.edu points to the three nodes.

    Depending on what your users do, that's probably all you will need.

    InitZero

  3. duh. by Zurk · · Score: 2

    http://linuxvirtualserver.org and also compile CORBA into your kernels. you will be wasting machines tho..that stuff is built for fault tolerance. you might want to have a look at MOSIX if all you want to do is have "one big cluster". MOSIX can be d/led from freshmeat (may screw up your kernel - beware).

  4. What are you trying to achieve? by booch · · Score: 3

    When creating a cluster, you want to have a clear goal in mind. A cluster combines the resources of several machines, making them appear as one machine. What resources do you want to combine? Do the machines have to appear as a single machine to reach that goal?

    Beowulf would be a good solution if you want to combine computational power, but your programs must be written for a parallel processing API.

    Linux Virtual Servers is a decent solution if you want to implement network services such as a web server. There are commercial products that can do this as well. (Alteon boxes do it in hardware, TurboLinux has a software product.)

    If you're trying to combine the systems into one big server that you can log into, I don't think that there is anything that can do that.

    --
    Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.