multiple install servers; memdisk

[Steffen Grunewald]

On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 04:48:41PM +0200, Anders Jackson wrote:
> ons 2005-05-25 klockan 16:20 +0200 skrev Thomas Lange:
> > If the network load is a problem (full load on the servers network is
> > not a problem, it's a perfect configuration of your network!) start
> > using multiple Debian mirrors. These are easy to keep in sync and most
> > of the network load is getting packages from the Debian mirror to the
> > install clients.

Good idea. I could even have a single sources.list - and installation would
automatically pick the freshest mirror of every single package. Does
apt-get do load balancing (given the same package is available from 
multiple servers)? If not, that would belong on the wishlist (add some
kind of weight to every deb line, preferring local mirrors...)

> And if you give those mirrors same name alias in DNS and Fai uses this
> alias. Your DNS-server should deliver IP-numbers in round robin. That
> is, you get simple load balancing almost free :).

But I'd have to setup a DNS just for the private cluster network. Which
I don't have yet (and NIS does a fine job spreading host lists)

> Sould always study where the problem/load realy are. Never fix something
> where the load is not a problem.

Good point. 

> <guess-mode>
> In Fai the load shouldn't be at the fai-server (boot and
> configurations). The large amount of data/load should be from the
> server/s that delivers deb-packages.
> </guess-mode>

Sounds very realistic.

So the load indeed is imposed mostly on the package servers (mirrors).
And everything boils down to whether apt-get does load-balancing or not.
Who knows?

BTW, I still like the idea of having multiple DHCP servers. 
Unfortunately, the second one (if no FAI server) would simply let the
node boot from its harddisk - not exactly what's intended.
Switch off the additional DHCP servers for FAI installations?


Have to ponder this a bit longer. Off-line. See ya -

 Steffen


-- 
Steffen Grunewald * MPI fuer Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut)
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