[Spacewalk-list] Is it possible?

[Clifford Perry]

Troy Banther wrote:
> At work, one of the departments would like to build a Beowulf cluster.
> Since I am the Linux person on campus they requested my services. Not
> that I don't already have other projects. lol.
>
> Red hat is our "primary" Linux. I also just completed building a
> Spacewalk server. So, being as my mind works, I thought it might be
> interesting to combine the two systems.
>
> Since there are Red hat engineers on the list with much better access
> to Red hat documents and practice I thought I would ask. I've always
> found that asking about saves hours of wading through useless pages on
> the Internet.
>
> I am thinking it would be fantastic to manage the cluster with
> Spacewalk and SSH since it will eventually move away from the data
> center to the basement of the department requesting it.
>
>   
I am not familiar with management of Beowulf clusters to answer for 
certain, but my gut feeling is no. We can do OS provisioning, along with 
installing RPM's onto each system. You have configuration management 
within Satellite to control and deploy config files. You have usage of 
osad for quick reply on scheduled events. You have remote commands as 
part of provisioning entitlement to execute commands from central 
console, you can keep systems up to date with packages and compare 
systems to see what is different. We have a pretty extensive API for 
automating a lot of repetitive items.

So we can do a lot, but with no direct code to manage Beowulf I have to 
say no, but I bet you could make Spacewalk do 90% of what you want done 
on a daily basis if you looked at its capabilities and compared to what 
you need to get done.

Cliff.


-- 
Clifford Perry
Team Lead, Satellite Engineering
Red Hat, Inc. 
http://www.redhat.com/
+1 919 754 4403
RHCA / RHCE# 805007680128201