Cluster administration

[Henning Glawe]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 03:16:34PM -0400, Ari Pollak wrote:
> The installation seems easy enough and I've seen a lot of success 
> reports with large clusters and FAI, but nobody seems to have reported 
> anything about administration _after_ the initial installation.
PFAI is able to do this task; we use it in a cluster of currently 113
machines exactly for this purpose; this setup runs for nearly two years
now.
most of PFAI is already included in FAI, currently I am preparing some
patches for thomas lange to merge the rest of my extensions into FAI.

basic idea:
every administrator has rw access to a cvs repository (our core team
consists of 5 people), where the configuration data is stored. each
client does a checkout of this central repository on installation time
and updates its checked out copy when a call-for-update is issued (we
broadcast these using a prepared ssh key for root). the machine logs the
differences as told by cvs into a file cvs.log. 
then a nearly normal FAI installation is done, of cause without doing
the harddisk partitioning and mkfs, feeding cvs.log into a special
mechanism of fcopy.

I wanted to prepare a talk on this for Debian @ LinuxTag, but this was
refused for the "big" rooms.
If there are some people interested in this, I'll prepare it anyway and
use one of the small rooms (for about 50 people) they offer.

-- 
c u
henning