Linux Clustering

SPK writes "A colleague and I recently discussed how New Riders's most highly regarded book -- Paul DuBois's MySQL -- corresponds to O'Reilly's worst dud: MySQL & mSQL. Charles Bookman's Linux Clustering does nothing to improve New Riders's reputation. The book is divided into eleven chapters, unevenly distributed among three sections: an overview of clustering for Linux, building clusters, and maintaining clusters. Four appendices provide brief information about online clustering resources, options for RedHat's 'Kickstart,' options for DHCP, and information on 'Condor ClassAd Machine Attributes.'" To find out why Krause was so displeased with this book, read on below for his review. Linux Clustering. Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters author Charles Bookman pages xv + 265 publisher New Riders rating 2/10 reviewer Steve Krause ISBN 1578702747 summary A guide to clustering software, networking, and journaling filesystems

Bookman emphasizes a central piece of wisdom that no system administrator should ignore: redundancy. In the case of high availability clusters, parts redundancy is the name of the game, but one should not forget the human component; no administrator should be caught with only a cell phone -- keep a pager just in case. However, in a post-modern turn that might seem brilliant if it were applied in a work of fiction rather than a technical book, the author seems to apply the concept of redundancy to the text itself.

That the book began not as a book but rather as a collection of talks or presentations, or some other smaller format, is evidenced by the repetition of information between chapters and sections. Such nearly poetic repetitions also occurs within sentences and paragraphs (e.g. "nightly backups each night" on page 25).

An editor never looked at Linux Clustering; the book had two "technical reviewers" but their contributions seemingly didn't include fixing mangled syntax and strained style. On page 14 in the second paragraph a large segment of a sentence from the previous page is pasted into another sentence, resulting in a nonsensical block of text. The number of hyphenation, syntax, word choice, and subject-verb agreement errors is atrocious and makes the book difficult to read.

Some of the misinformation in the text appears to be unintentional (but ignorance is no excuse for a UNIX systems administrator); some is due to the fact that the author deals only with old (2.2) kernels (though the book came out 18 months after the 2.4 kernel release), old versions of journaling filesystems, and old distributions; and yet other misinformation is the result of misplaced attempts at humor (such as stating that GNU stands for the Gateway Naming Utility; one can only hope that this was intended to be funny). Other jokes often misfire, but do point to the intended audience (consider, for example, the section heading "Space: The Final Frontier").

In the Introduction, the author indicates that the book should be read by "Linux enthusiasts and users who want to get a Linux cluster up and running with the least amount of fuss." The organization of the book will not, however, aid this enterprise, for there is little "how to" information provided, but rather a great deal of background information on compiling kernels, various types of journaling file systems, and RedHat's Kickstart (perhaps inappropriate considering that the book specifically states that basic information will not be covered). Another section or two deal with basic networking and security. Various types of clusters are discussed, as are a few of the types of clustering software (e.g. Condor and Mosix) available.

The book, however, is clearly intended for administrators of clustering systems; a special emphasis is high-availability and load-balancing clusters. Parallel computing and the types of applications end users would wish to run receive far too little discussion.

Almost all technical books regurgitate the contents of freely available FAQs and HOWTOs to some degree, yet the good ones summarize the relevant points, make dry documentation more accessible, and give the reader some new insights. Because Bookman's Linux Clustering suffers from heinous spelling, grammar, and style errors; deals primarily with outdated software; contributes little new to the discussion; and doesn't speak to non-admins, I can only recommend that those interested in Linux clustering stick to online FAQs and HOWTOs.

You can purchase the Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

No good books?

[bluethundr]

Why is it so tough to find a decent book on this topic? Even O'Reilly failed here.

Paul DuBois, MySQL

[MattRog]

Not to mention he knows *nothing* of relational theory:
http://www.pgro.uk7.net/qu092902.htm

Re:Paul DuBois, MySQL

[ppanon]

Not to mention he knows *nothing* of relational theory:

It seems that a large majority of MySQL users also know little or nothing about relational theory. The MySQL core developers fought a long time against including support for foreign key constraints. Thus not knowing anything about relational theory may not be a drawback in writing a book about MySQL; it matches the target audience, even if it fails to educate.

O'Reilly's worst dud was also about Linux clusters

[Frater 219]

Here's O'Reilly's worst dud.

How bad was it? It came with a CD-ROM that was supposed to automate the process of setting up a Beowulf cluster. None of the software on the CD-ROM worked. Running the install script printed out a message telling you to go to a Web site and download the newest beta version of the software. No such software was available ... ever. O'Reilly shortly withdrew the book ... and, reportedly at least, fired the editor who approved it for publication.

Want more details? Here you go. Waiting for this book, and then discovering slowly just how awful it was, set back a clustering project at my workplace by several months, by the way.

So...what books DO you all recommend?

[SailFly]

For somebody who wants to learn about Linux clusters. I've played with Mosix and was impressed. What are good books and sources to learn about Linux Clusters?

OK, so who's got a GOOD book on this topic?

[Elias Israel]

I hate to turn this into an Ask Slashdot, but truth is I could really use a good book on Linux clustering, especially if it covers:

1. Clustering (not just replicating) MySQL databases.
2. Network attached storage.
3. Load balancing and failover.
4. Probably six other things I'm not thinking of right now.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Re:OK, so who's got a GOOD book on this topic?

[ashpool7]

I wrote up a paper for my employer a while ago about most of those topics. The sad truth is that a comprehensive guide is not available, and most of the solutions are proprietary. However, there are a few bright lights.

Eddie: Load Balancing Software
http://eddie.sourceforge.net/

Linux Virtual Server Project: Clustering Tools
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

OpenAFS: Efficient Distributed Storage
http://www.openafs.org/

Load-balancing and failover are tough nuts. You can do some stupid things like Round Robin DNS or Rotary NAT, but to be actual balancing, you need a balancer box. You can either make your own (using proprietary software or the stuff above) or buy a piece of hardware to do the job for you. I've heard Cisco makes some good ones.

NAS units usually operate using CIFS, AFP, or NFS, all of which are pretty lame options for a modern cluster. SANs are pretty cool, but you need some big-ass hardware to support them. Personally, I'm working on an OpenAFS cluster, which is pretty easy if you look into the capabilites of the software. Coda is another option of which I'm not using because it doesn't play as well with Windows.

As for clustering MySQL: If you read the Slashdot interview log they had a couple days ago, you'd see that the setup here is a master writer that replicates to a couple of reader databases. This is about as effective as it gets with MySQL. If you need higher power, I've read that commercial versions of Postgres support clustering/synchronization. More powerful than that and you're into Oracle territory.