[K12OSN] openMosix test packages

[Shawn Austin]

I have used openmosix on and off for about a year or so now.
At one point I had a cluster of 10 2.8 GHz machines running a load
balancing setup for the ltsp server that I was running.
There are a few things that you need to know before you use this as your
live setup though.
Programs that use shared memory usually die when they migrate. 
Openoffice has never worked well in that setup.  It would occasionally
die when migrated to another, idle machine.  Openoffice will almost
always opt to migrate because of the high processor usage.  Java apps,
for the most part, do not survive the migration, and will sometimes lock
up X when they die.

Another thing that you should keep in mind using client stations as part
of your load balancing cluster is that sometimes people just hit the
power button on them.  Whatever processes that were on that box will go
down with the box if it is not cleanly rebooted.

Imagine working on an important paper in openoffice.  Someone next to
you has their station lock up, so they hit the power button.  Your paper
you were working on was running off of the box that just got rebooted. 
You loose your paper...

If you do decide to use this setup, make sure you test the hell out of
all the apps before you go live with it.  You might also want to
disconnect the power button on the front of the case.

Good luck,

Shawn Austin

On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 04:30, Dennis Daniels wrote:
> We're anxious to try the openmosix package :) Hopefully we'll  give it a 
> go this week on a test bank of servers and clients.
> 
> On a related note; we've found a work around for 15" monitors. It 
> doesn't require a lot of mucking around with scan rates either :) How? 
> We do a full install off the network onto the harddrive!
> 
> connect to network
> load the install rom 1 for k12
> on boot
> linux askmethod
> NFS image
> IP address
> /location_install
> Then walk through installation questions.
> On a 10/100 network the install takes about 45 minutes. We had some real 
> low-level skilled students setting up fat-clients all morning.
> 
> The drivers for the monitors and the nic/sound/video cards are loaded 
> and the screens work! Even with Fedora Core 1! (Last time we loaded FC1 
> half our monitors stopped working.) Those old monitors have a new life!
> 
> We're setting up the runlevel to 3 and logon 'Student' no password and 
> the bash profile runs X -query and boom! The old 15" monitor is working 
> and the machine is running as a client!
> 
> But what's really cool is that it could be running as a server too. The 
> clients have hard-drives! We need to turn off DHCP off all of the 
> secondary servers and set up one machine as the /home... but in theory 
> all of our fat clients could be running as clients and serving LTSP at 
> the same time, right?!
> 
> The logins go straight to LTSP clients... my students only see the 
> machines as a client but they could all be running openmosix in the 
> background basically providing roughly 5-6 gigs of RAM and the 
> equivalent in CPU cycles. We've got bags of RAM we'd ripped out of the 
> 'clients' soon-to-be servers (?) that we could put back in and really up 
> the clustered RAM access.
> 
> All of our machines are donations, including the server. We're on a real 
> shoestring = NO money at all. So anything to pool the energies of the 
> available hardware is of major importance to us. Has anyone else played 
> with the openmosix/ ltsp packages? Would you care to share your 
> experiences and your hardware/ network environment?
> 
> Best regards
> Dennis
> 
> Eric Harrison wrote:
> > This is just a "rough draft", not even alpha-quality...
> > 
> > ftp://k12linux.mesd.k12.or.us/pub/openmosix-ltsp/
> > 
> > 
> > Read the README to install/configure.
> > 
> > -Eric
> > 
> > 
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> > 
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