[et-mgmt-tools] Cluster Provisioning

[Michael DeHaan]

Ronald Valente wrote:
> Cobbler Community.
>
> I am currently working on an independent study to bring up a cluster 
> every night and tear it down before the labs re-open in the morning. 
> Here is a quick run down.
>
> The labs have PXE boot as the first option as the motherboard because 
> the students use it to select which OS they need to use.
>
> The lab has 80 computers 40 on each subnet.
>
> Two head nodes one for each subnet.
>
> It would be nice to use cobble in conjunction with a distributed file 
> system. Then each computer would boot via PXE on started, install the 
> OS and store the files on a distributed file system. Then after the 
> initial install sequence there would be no more boot time other than 
> booting from the distributed file system. We are currently try Rocks 
> clusters and its giving us more headaches then if we just rolled our 
> own distro. The only requirement is that we run condor.
>
> Regards,
> Ron Valente
>
> _______________________________________________
> et-mgmt-tools mailing list
> et-mgmt-tools at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools 
In general, cobbler supports anything kickstart can do, so this might be 
an Anaconda question or one better suited for kickstart-list at redhat.com ...

Offhand, it seems like it would be easier to provision each box with a 
minimal local OS every night (for  simplicity), and then just have them 
mount the distributed filesystem as appropriate -- but then I'm really 
not a distributed filesystem expert.   Just the base OS packages and 
whatever it takes to make the machine manageable...

If anyone else has any other ideas and comments, feel free to chime in.

--Michael