Hi,
Anyone here got any advice on setting up diskless crunchers? Most of the livecd's out there have a gui which don't want or are only 32bit, would also prefer to boot off network but it never quite seems to work how it should.
Steve
I run one of my 64 bit boxes from a USB drive with Ubuntu. Not quite diskless since it's really a solid state disk...
Pxe would work too but it can be some mucking around especially for multiple hardware platforms.
I seem to remember on the old forum Yoda had some detailed instructions on this (correct me if I'm wrong!).. If so, could you repost the instructions WMY?
Yep... definitely talk to Yoda about it...
he was running a system with driveless "nodes" from memory .... one main machine and a number of hard-drive-diskless-nodes running "off it".
Sweet, thanks, different hardware doesn't matter, they are all dell blades (taking them over till customers grab them), all dual proc intel with same bnx2 nic, all so far have been E5305, but getting another 7 in place from that to E5460.
Last attempt was to load entire system via initrd.img (yes, nasty but was hopful it would work :))
I remember Skip Da Shu posting about using Dotsch/UX. Dotsch/UX is based on Ubuntu and is available in 32 and 64-bit versions. The PXE boot templates are missing on the x64 distribution and must be separately downloaded and copied.
I'm not sure if it's the kind of thing you are after but you could have a look and see if it was suitable:
Dotsch/UX - A USB/Diskless/Harddisk BOINC Ubuntu Linux Distribution (http://www.dotsch.de/boinc/Dotsch_UX.html)
I can't remember how I did it - it's been quite a while. I do remember that for some projects it was error prone, due to heavy disk usage (and thus contention). USB boot works better for me (and USB keys are very cheap) but only where supported by the system!
I actually install (a command line 64 bit version of) Linux on the USB Flash drive as if it were a HDD, i.e. not a live CD. 1GB will work but 4GB is better if the project you want to support needs a fair bit of space.
Thanks for the link, looks to be excatly what I need, will give it a shot later tonight.
Unfotunately USB isn't a possibility as the system is in another state :)
Ok, tried Dotsch/UX but gui via remote console performed very poorly (move mouse from top of screen to bottom and cursor would show moving over like 60 seconds & then the install crashed, but I did find a good doc for migrating a Ubuntu system to a diskless system (http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/HOWTO:_Convert_Ubuntu_to_Diskless) which worked quite well so have 1 diskless system running now. Ubuntu seems to be a good choice, no driver issues as have with Debian, Windows and CentOS.
Not ideal as have an entire copy of the OS on a 2nd system, may play around later with having a read-only rootfs and mounting client specific Boinc and writable dirs but that will have to wait till get additional power feed hooked up to unit and can turn on remaining blades (hopefully tommorow).
Arr, I should note that already had tftp & dhcp server in place as use it for system installs so only needed the sections mkinitramfs and NFS, you don't need a NAS as specified in the document, just somewhere you can setup an NFS server.
Ah well I guess Dotsch/UX was worth a try. Good that you have it working with another method. Obviously those E5460 blades need a thorough testing on BOINC. :)
I know some people use diskless systems successfully for BOINC but I don't know whether it suits all projects. I remember someone tried it with Climate Prediction some years a go and they said that although it worked it slowed down processing unacceptably because the Climate Prediction application needed to write to the hard disk very often. The Climate Prediction application may have changed since then though.
I wouldn't mind doing a bit of CPDN again later after my little foray on WCG and AQUA. Pity I can't use Linux to crunch with my video card, because Linux 64-bit worked very well with the Climate Slab tasks.