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ClusterKnoppix
chronicon writes "Knoppix is the ultimate live CD. No geek-kit should be without it. Now Wim Vandersmissen has taken it a step futher by adding openMosix functionality. Drop the clusterKnoppix CD in your "server", boot up... boot up some networked clients... Knoppix built in LTSP magic kicks in and ta-da--instant cluster!"
Ok, Kidding. I'm actually quite impressed with the wide support Knoppix provides for hardware and functionality. 5 years ago, the network computer theory was being trundled out, AGAIN. Now we have the capability for a truly functional dumb terminal/server configuration and it will run on any commodity hardware/software higher than a 486DX(allegedly). It ran well on my oddball Celeron 300 with a 640x480 monitor, although right now that is my only complaint with the various implementations of X...
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
clusterKnoppix is in desperate need of mirrors. here's one (but i urge you all to make a .torrent or something):k noppix/
http://www.openmosixview.com/cluster
for a crappy yet less bloaty altenative, check out PlumpOS: http://plumpos.sourceforge.net/
Not too many 'common' apps, but things like PVM PovRay, make, various CD ripping/video processing utilities. There is a list on OpenMOSIX.org
With the experimental DSM patches being developed, Apache even runs, but most things like databases and web servers generally don't because they depend on shared memory to work, and shared memory on a cluster is a difficult thing to provide if oyu want any kind of performance.
From Knoppix.org What are the minimum system requirements?
Intel-compatible CPU (i486 or later),
20 MB of RAM for text mode, at least 96 MB for graphics mode with KDE (at least 128 MB of RAM is recommended to use the various office products),
bootable CD-ROM drive,
or a boot floppy and standard CD-ROM (IDE/ATAPI or SCSI),
standard SVGA-compatible graphics card,
serial or PS/2 standard mouse or IMPS/2-compatible USB-mouse.
And for graphics mode, you need a monitor that will support 800x600 for reasonable performance. it will run at 640x480, but feels cramped.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-05-20-EN-cl1.iso.torrent
(also added to the main clusterknoppix website)
you can do it in both ways. i had 2 nics that support pxe boot, i just had to follow the wizard on the server, and turn the clients on. job done. ah, i precautionally turned off my already running dhcp server after booting the first clusterknoppix machine, don't know if it was necessary, i was afraid of conflicting dhcp servers because clusterknoppix starts it's own with the wizard.
From the web site:
* "openMosix terminal server" - uses PXE, DHCP and tftp to boot linux clients via the network.
No CDrom drive/harddisk/floppy needed for the clients
* openMosix autodiscovery - new nodes automatically join the cluster (no configuration needed)
* Clustermanagement tools - openMosix userland/openMosixview
* Every node has rootaccess to every other node via ssh/RSAkeys
* MFS/dfsa support
* Every node can run full blown X (PC-room/demo setup) or console only (more memory available)
Aside from the "every node has root access" bit, am I way out in left field thinking that this would make a good computer lab system? Just start up the clients and they pull from the Knoppix central server and you're done. No need to have floppies, or even to bother locking down a system. The student does something screwy to the PC, hit reset and you're back to fresh configuration.
Or am I missing something completely here?
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
PXE describes a method where the NIC in the computer bootstraps the information it needs to boot off of the network. Many modern computers have NICs that support this. Newworld Macintoshes can netboot, as can most recent 3com cards (even my 3 year old Dell supports it).
Basically, the NIC makes a DHCP (or BOOTP) request for an IP address. The DHCP protocol allows the server to return the address of a TFTP (Trivial FTP) server along with the IP address for the client. The client contacts the TFTP server to get a kernel (vmlinuz), and then boots directly into that. From there, the kernel should be configured to mount its filesystems over NFS, and finish the boot process. I'm sure Google can point you to a more complete explanation.
What makes ClusterKnoppix so cool is that it's usually a huge pain to set up a TFTP/DHCP/NFS server correctly for multiple clients. ClusterKnoppix does it all for you, so all you need are some (really) "dumb" clients and all the heavy lifting is done for you.
http://condor.madoka.be/clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-0 5-20-EN-cl1.iso
> If you set this up correctly all the computers that you boot
> up with this become a mosix cluster?
an openMosix cluster, not a mosix cluster.
>Then all the users are terminals off of this cluster?
if you want, yes.
> So all of the users have some of all of the power of the
> Mosix cluster?
yes
> I just wonder how well mosix handles nodes dropping
> off and back on again.
if a node goes down for a small time, and then comes back, no problem. if a node goes down for a time long enough to finish his work, processes won't come back where they came from, so you (or your apps or scripts) have to take care of this situation. tipically in a cluster you don't want nodes to go down, never. this can be a situation tipical in a pc laboratory or the like, for an entire campus this probably is not adequate, you need something more "grid computing aware"
>Plus how well will can is scale?
it depends a lot on the speed of the connection between nodes, on the type and amount of traffic generated and so on the type of computation being made, on the number of nodes, on the speed of the clients, etc...
>Could you have five hundred or a thousand systems off in the cluster.
tecnically up to 65535 nodes (last 2 bytes of ipv4 address) if i'm not wrong. i was told biggest cluster of this types count 1-2k nodes, but i'm not sure.
pay no attention to the "insightful" comments that serve to dress up a "Fuck you, MS dude."
I'll try to give you an actual response. People have been quick to mention Knoppix CD's for rescue operations -- this doesn't apply to the Clustering feature, just knoppix in general. I used one of these last night to fix my roommate's system which had gotten totally owned and was halting at LILO. Could i have done it with a floppy based linux distro? Probly, but it would've been a bigger pain, because the floppy is small and may not have the tools i need, whereas a CD is big enough to have damn near everything.
That being out of the way - some uses for the cluster disks.
1. say your server (using ClusterKnoppix), which has a hard disk and lots of ram, etc, runs a really dynamic web site which needs lots of CPU. If you see that you're getting shitload of connections you take some other systems that aren't critical, pop in a CD and reboot and add their processors to the pool to help out the web server
2. as has been mentioned, in academic institutions, you could use this to harness the computers down the hall in the public lab for experiments overnight...
3. i don't today, but someday i may need a cluster, and why make it difficult if i can pop a CD in 6 LAN systems and get it going rather than spending a week on configuration. Shit, i've had occasions where my computer was compiling for 3 days straight... would've been nice to fire up a couple of secondary systems to help out...
i suppose you could call these contrived examples, but they're not wholly unrealistic. i think what you're getting at is, "why should normal people care?" which is a good question. is this useful for 90% of computer users? fuck no. 1%? Maybe. it solves the problem of running a cluster which can be simply and arbitrarily resized (keyword simply). If you have no need for a cluster, then you certainly don't care about a resizable one.
keep in mind though, that lots of things can be cool without being useful to yourself. i have no need for a supercomputer, but i still think they're pretty interesting and cool. i think this is a cool technology too, useful for a certain class of problem, and a limited set of users.
that's my 57 yen... for what it's worth.