Slashdot Mirror
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!"
... forget it.
Wow, This Is Pretty Cool. There Are Alot Of Possibilities Of Instant Networking Here. ALOT Of Possibilities.
FTP Server seemed to be shutdown
-- Cliff Albert
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
I found out about OpenMosix recently, and I'd been looking for an excuse to test it out. This just makes it even easier.
I'm wondering how difficult it is to setup. Is it as easy as the poster made it sound?
Just add water!
I just soiled myself with joy!
While I do admit knoppix is pretty cool and this is certainly one degree cooler, I have to admit I don't really see how useful this can be?
Can cretans create clusterfuck of Clusterknoppixes?
Repeal the DMCA!
The author's got some really funny images on his site.
All I have to say is.. <voice actor="nelson">Ha ha!</voice>
"Knoppix is the ultimate live CD"
That's what they said about "Peter Framptom Comes Live" too.
There can only be one ultimate!
Does that mean now I'm going to get sued for every terminal client now, as well as ever server? Damn I'd start saving. Or get a job at Novell.
You bought her a Kentucky Fried Chicken Franchise!!!
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/
"OpenMosixKnoppix didn't quite sound good, so I called it ClusterKnoppix ;)"
I would have chosen Kloppix...the "l" for cluster, the rest is self-explanitory.
What is the minimum hardware needed to support this? Obviously a NIC, but can it run diskless (no HDD or CD)?
:-)
That suddenly makes for a VERY cheap grid node. (Didn't want to use the "B" word
Bittorrents going up in ~20 mintes, stand by.
What applications can I run right away if I burn a bunch of these and boot up a few of the machines on my network? Do I have to configure IP addresses? Does it assume I have DHCP installed? Which Linux programs will automatically benefit from the cluster?
Do not use MOSIX in a HA cluster. MOSIX is great for HP situations but for a terminal server, arghh
I have here a compaq contura Aero 486 sx/33 with 4megs of ram and a 170 meg HD. I find that Caldara, while being one of the only things that will run on it, is a might bit slugish.
The contura Aero is particulary annoying because of it's use of a Pcmcia floppy drive, and only 1 type II slot. For those unfamilar, it's not like you can hot swap the floppy and have it still work or anything useful like that.
For me it's either the laptop or a old net terminal for telnet fuctionality, and the laptop takes up less space.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I dont know enough about open mosix, but would this concievably work for game servers? Problems I forsee would be the issue of the servers needing to bind to ips, and secondly, the server process switching nodes and lagging like hell.
anyone know enough to talk about this?
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
Linux must stop trying to be like Windows. The lack of Unix sysadmins that made dumbed-down Windows NT the choice for small businesses in the mid-90s is no longer a problem, and companies need only worry about functionality rather than whether their sysadmin is competent enough to set up by any other method than point-and-click (or fit-and-forget).
Linux's enterprise respectability (and I mean real enterprise, not 20-employee small office) would come from "innovating" from such systems as VMS, not Windows.
This will be an interesting study? How useful will multiple independant bittorrents be?
If you have multiple Torrent servers/trackers, won't you be limiting the available bandwitdth?
What's this Submit thingy do?
"openMosix terminal server" - uses PXE, DHCP and tftp to boot linux clients via the network. No CDrom drive/harddisk/floppy needed for the clients
How do the clients work if no CDrom/HD/Floppy is needed? I am trying to wrap my brain around this one. I get the cluster server idea, but then does the server determine which clients on the network will boot into the cluster? Is it via DHCP? Doesn't there need to be *something* on the client side like a HD/floppy/CDrom so it can boot?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
afaik it is installable, but you need a bit more space, about 2gb. speaking of beowulf cluster of beowulf cluster, in clusterknoppix there is bochs (and it can migrate through nodes), so maybe you could run clusterknoppix recursively into itself...
So that's a "no" to Debian?
Hmph, now I wish Debian had a mascot so that I could claim you made him cry.
I'm expecting big speedups for my SETI@home work. Now lemme get my hands on those ISOs...
this is truly remarkable and only could be done in an open source envronment. it is projects liek this that clearly show that it is only a matter of time before we look back and go "micro who?". forget the billions in the bank, the fud, the monopoly, etc., could they really do something like this? and when the cat is finally, really out of the bag, about the quality of F/OSS, it will be amazing.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Linux Magazine just did a three-article bonanza on how Beowulf clusters came about, and the costs and issues involved with running one.
This could blow all of that away; Just insert the CD in all of the machines in your office, and let fly. Air conditioning? Already accounted for. Power consumption? Not much more than usual. Floorspace? Just a little under everyone's desk.
What I'd like to see would be companies switching over to all-Linux or mostly-Linux shops, running all their machines as an OpenMosix cluster. They could sell off their spare CPU cycles, quite easily. Ironically, IT's never been so cheap.
What's this Submit thingy do?
one example: http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/#Documentation the last one.
Start a cluster of these with some profitable computations at work in the evening, using every worker's own PC, then come in first in the morning to remove all evidences quickly and painlessly... (or even watch over that all during your graveyard shift as a sysadmin)... Instant cluster - that's clever.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
...and just like a light bulb powering itself illuminating the surface of an attached photovoltaic cell, you'll get more processing power with knoppix clustering with knoppix inside of virtual machines... ...Someone had to say it!
I would propose the moniker "Cloppix"
Brings to mind images of a certain powerful one eyed giant...
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
Sounds like it will fit perfectly next to my easy bake oven...
'1 tablespoon Knoppix, 3 lbs unprocessed x86 hardware'
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Noone should read his shit
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
has replaced tomsrtbt as my rescue tool of choice.
..... what these people have managed to pull off is fantastic.
It probably would have done so even if any of my latest machines had a floppy drive
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
instead of the ethernet ROM?
you obviously know what you're talking about. gentoo is NOT easy to install and maintainence is a beeetch. i've commonly had systems become so flubergusted that they won't boot after a simple emerge -u world. glibc problems. even booting in restore mode (from chrooted via cdrom), wouldn't let me fix it except to untar the stages again. that of course was basically a reinstall.
/etc/fstab file, or how to ... do 20 other steps that must be done in the right order that you'll never need to know in day to day use.
oh sure, it's still 1.4b as in beta, but at this rate it'll become debian status. also, i don't think the 1.4b really holds much water now because as i understand using the 1.2 boot cd and installing a fresh system will give you a current system with all the packages (bugs included).
gentoo is a great distro in dire need of maturity and lots more package maintainers. an installer for gentoo causes quite the discussion on the irc and on the forums. most gentooers for some strange reason are against an installer completely. their reasoning is that you don't get your hands dirty enough using a simplified installer. no need to learn fdisk commands or how to format a ext3 partition, or how to mount a swap disk, or how to create/edit (using the nano editor) a
Everyone is talking about how cool this is and how well it runs but what would I use this for in the real world (even the 'fake' world). So, I have a network by day, cluster by night. What am I going to run on it? I mean folding proteins in realtime may be cool to some but, come on... I really would like to understand (I'm an MCSE running all MSFT except one server - finance server is running RedHat). Someone explain this to me (linux avocates - this is your chance)...
clusterKNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-05-20-EN-cl1.iso.torrent
(also added to the main clusterknoppix website)
here! Be gentle, the torrent itself is hosted on my school account, and I'll get ownzored by the administration if we get /.ed.
If you set this up correctly all the computers that you boot up with this become a mosix cluster? Then all the users are terminals off of this cluster?
So all of the users have some of all of the power of the Mosix cluster?
This could be very very cool. Imagine a whole campus of users running this. Each user would have access to a super computer.
I just wonder how well mosix handles nodes dropping off and back on again. Plus how well will can is scale? Could you have five hundred or a thousand systems off in the cluster. Where is Mr. Barr when you need him?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Did you boot the client workstations over the network (Using PXE or something similar?) or did you boot both the clients and the server from CD? (The story mentioned the LTSP
I'm curious about how difficult it is to boot clients over the network.
- http://www.braveterry.com/
I'd rather not choose that one - "kloppen" is German vernacular for "to hit/strike someone", so Herr Knopper might take offense. On the other hand, it does beat the closed source competition...
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
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?
Quick cluster question, can't find a fast answer on their site: how fast does the performance boost degrade as you add nodes? Using their technology, does it "top out"? That is, does the over head of maintaining more and more nodes, scheduleing the jobs, etc., eventually kill any performance boost you get from adding the node...
If Slashdot is where the spelling-challenged go when they die, I'm in heaven.
Several of us were looking to do this using Mandrake, for several business with ~ 100 employees. This may be where we head instead. The one problem is the slow speed for the server, so we are setting up a server with 4 gigs of ram. 3 gigs will be used for a tmpfs where we will load / and /usr for nfs mounts. Totally cool stuff.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've heard many people refer to clusters as a way to turn many small coomputers into one large one, but it doesn't work this way. There is nothing magical about a cluster, and it's not exactly like clustering gives you instant supercomputers because (sort of like with SMP) you need your software to be cluster-aware. Clusters aren't really useful in anything other than some very specialized applications where computing-intensive calculations can be broken down into small tasks. Perhaps intensive graphics as in movie post-production or scientific calculations, but not your general IT stuff.
grisha.org
But if you have multiple processes, it'll distribute them.
"SIMPLE to INSTALL."
:)
Ahhh, so you like Mandrake too.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
Knoppix is very impressive. As a former Debian (now Gentoo) user and administrator, I can appreciate the quality of the "back-end" engineering in distributions like Debian, which is IMHO hands down the best binary distribution out there (Gentoo is a source based distro, as is Linux from Scratch and Source Mage. It is my preference for source based distros, and portage in particular with Gentoo, that led me to switch, not any argument with the quality of Debian or apt-get, which is excellent). To see such a slick, astonishingly easy live-cd environment put on top of such a quality distribution is delightful, and while I yearn for a Gentoo knoppix (and will likely get my wish with their ever-improving but as yet no-where-near-as-good-as knoppix live-CDs), I have on more than one occasion used a knoppix CD to rescue a non-debian (Gentoo, Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, you-name-it) distribution.
Having such easy clustering, with such an idiot-proof interface ("put the CD in the drive, boot, and you're ready to go"), built upon such a solid foundation where shortcuts that afflict other distributions haven't been taken, is truly an achievement worthy of praise and respect.
In short, knoppix already rocked, and now they have surpassed themselves again! Very, very cool!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Mandrake is the bomb-digity. Our OS of choice for all the CS and PVK servers scattered about the room.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
never mind. I was reading at level 5.
Duh..
why is it I can go out to the bittorrent main site and click the link for RedHat 9, and the bittorrent prompt comes right up...but when I try to click on this clusterknoppix bittorrent link, mozilla tries to display it to screen? Can anyone help?
You ain't from around these parts, are you? :-)
In all seriousness though, I do think that your MCSE and your Windows environment is limiting you here. I actually think the MCSE should be changed to CMSE, because you are a Certified Microsoft System Engineer. You are taught how to admin Microsoft systems only. It's OK, those are necessary things. But the problem is that you have been taught how to think in a "Microsoft world". There is a lot outside that world. Clustered computing is one of them. A bootable distro (ala Knoppix and others) is another.
I am sure when the bootable floppy distro came out, the MCSE's cried "what would I do with THAT?". Then CDRWs came about, and the bootable floppy turned into the bootable CD distro. The MS crowd said "Neat. Big deal." That has now turned into a bootable cluster server. Who knows where it might go from here. At some point, someone at Microsoft will say(or has already said) "Hey, that is cool. Can we do that?". They will try to buy the technology, and will find it can't be done. And they will try to build it from scratch, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I think it was Louis Armstrong, who when asked what Jazz is, said "Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know." I am afraid that applies here.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Looks like it would make creating a bunch of PXE X 'terminals' easy as cake.
:)
Plus you get mosix tossed in for good measure..
Impressive on first glance.. i know what ill be doing saturday
---- Booth was a patriot ----
i must second the thought of the AC. i am using bittorrent to grab this file in a %100 legal manner and im getting well over 200K.
So, when an incoming connection comes into the head-end, and then the incoming socket data is routed over the network to the remote machine running the accepting thread instance, and the reply is shuttled back over to the head-end, and then forwarded to the internet... how is that any better than having Apache running on each server individually behind a load-balancer?
It would be nice to run a database or app. server in the mosix cluster with a web front-end. Apache itself will not scale over the cluster.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
This is truly the problem of the linux crowd. Here is someone asking about linux and open minded. And the response "Hah we know and if you have to ask then that just shows what kind of person you are."
I tried out the previous release of the bootable knoppix and found it incredibly cool. But really, WHAT are the uses for this? or cluster knoppix that we should try or be interested? The only use i have for it is as a bootable cd in case my main os installation is trashed and I need to retrieve some files right away.
You HAVE to SELL the idea to people and not just <neovoice> Whoooaaa, coool dude.
No, the problem with the Linux crowd is when someone says "M$ 5uX0r5!!! U r L4M3!". But I don't really liken that to the Linux community, more to the "wannabe" community. I think my response is not inflammatory at all. I think that because of this guy's MS training, he cannot be open minded. He has been trained to think inside the MS box.
I tried out the previous release of the bootable knoppix and found it incredibly cool. But really, WHAT are the uses for this? or cluster knoppix that we should try or be interested? The only use i have for it is as a bootable cd in case my main os installation is trashed and I need to retrieve some files right away.
For some, this may be the only use, and it is a dang fine one. There are many other uses for it, none of which may appeal to you. But you have found a good use for it, so good for you. Other people may find others, or improve upon it in a way so that you may find it more useful. Knoppix fit a need for me, I modified it to create a bootable Quake server for LAN parties. Someone else has modded it to be a bootable MAME CD. I am sure there are many many others. Why immediately think there is no good use for it instead of trying to think of or create good uses for it? Or just recognize the fact that there are potentially other uses, even though you might not care about them? THAT is the difference in the OSS and the other computing industry.
You HAVE to SELL the idea to people and not just Whoooaaa, coool dude.
Wow. I guess I stand corrected. THIS is the real difference.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I never use Mandrake on a server... I roll my own servers, but for a PC desktop nothing beats Mandrake..
I include that poor excuse for an OS from Redmond WA.
On a Mac give me OSX 10.2.x or give me death.
I believe in using the best tool for that job at hand. Redmond WA has yet to provide me with the best too.. In my opinion.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
what is that exactly?
where i keep my long-expired condoms and my 12-sided die?
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
It's actually plain-old Knoppix that does all of that magic for you. The regular Knoppix distro is already setup to support PXE LTSP clients, ClusterKnoppix just added OpenMosix support.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
For those times when you have to prove that you are absolutely, positively the biggest nerd at the party.
... and because it *stomps* all over the competition, it should be called "klompen".
... but my first 'official' Linux CD distribution was Yggdrasil (prior to that, I dl'ed the linux tarball directly from funet.fi...) and it had, hands down, a fantastic 'live boot' feature. I used Yggdrasil Linux to rescue fragged FAT32 drives which DOS5.0 had given up on. Astounding!
...
It had X, even, and you could get it on the 'net. Alas, this was pre-browser days, so no NCSA Mosaic... well, not for the first Yggdrasil disk I tried, anyway.
They stopped doing live boot CD's because, I fear, they were ahead of their time - not everyone had a BIOS those days which allowed CD booting
But, just so you know, Linux has *always* had great live boot CD distro's around, from day one.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
That is good Chinese language support in Knoppix.
well, maybe you should have seeded you greedy bastard. I could use some dl speed right about now.
~
If you have a hard upload rate cap (common on cable modems), BitTorrent will often max out your upstream bandwidth. This SEVERLY limits your maximum download rate for TCP connections because ACK packets are being rate-limited along with everything else. Try getting a bittorrent client that allows upload rate limiting and limit it to about 1-2 K/sec below your ISP's hard limit, and you will probably see a dramatic improvement in download rates.
Knoppix boots YOU! Well, actually, now it looks like Knoppix can boot you anywhere :)
I don't do it myself, but I hear compiling everything from source can take some time. Friend of mine used three days on a P3. But it seems make makes use of this openmosix thing. Imagine what a gentoo install fest looks like after this? Just bring some big boxes to help with the compiling!
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Are you using the wheelmouse switch when you boot Knoppix?