High Performance Diskless Linux At AX-Div, LLNL

Lee Busby writes "As a co-author, I am biased, but I think that our recent paper describing a diskless Linux deployment at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (PDF)may be of general interest. It's a little different than most diskless systems -- simpler, and designed to be high performance."

Comments

Networked File systems

[wowbagger]

A quick skim of the PDF leads me to believe they are still using NFS for the operation.

My question would be, does anybody have any meaningful experiences using CodaFS or Intermezzio?

Where I work, we have NFS mounted home directories. When the main server goes down, we all get to twiddle our thumbs because we cannot do anything without a home directory.

It would seem to me that the caching of Coda and Intermezzio would be better - you still have the centralized management of the disk images, but you also get the speed of local access and the robustness of not having a single failure point in the server.

But I've not had time to set up a trial system - has anybody else?

Re:Networked File systems

[Craigory]

At my University there is a fairly large Andrew system which performs well. The only gotcha is that Andrew implements its own non-Unix file permissions, which is a bit confusing. Coda is of course based on Andrew. It differs only slightly in its concurrent write semantics.