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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
"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
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
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?
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.
> 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.