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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!"
... forget it.
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?
This is going to be great for quickly encoding DIVX movies in computer labs ;)
There is no god
The author's got some really funny images on his site.
"Knoppix is the ultimate live CD"
That's what they said about "Peter Framptom Comes Live" too.
There can only be one ultimate!
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/
Well, think of an environment where you have boxen sitting around unused part of the time, and want to be able to plug and unplug cluster components dynamically and not have any persistent data stored on the part time cluster members, Possibly even using them for windows and word processing during the day and cracking the xbox key at night.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
I wasnt trying to be funny I'm actually going to do this! It takes about 14 hours on a single windows machine right now (1Ghz AMDs). If I get 30 machines it should take little over half an hour to do a single movie. woo hoo
There is no god
"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
"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.
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.
I'm expecting big speedups for my SETI@home work. Now lemme get my hands on those ISOs...
well I do actually.... GNU/Vidomi
There is no god
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.
I did this... ... ..... ..
.
What's wrong with my computer?
#
# Modus Ponens
#
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!
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.