From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 26 8:12:34 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from Gloria.CAM.ORG (Gloria.CAM.ORG [205.151.116.34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2224637BDC8 for ; Wed, 26 Apr 2000 08:12:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from intmktg@CAM.ORG) Received: from localhost (intmktg@localhost) by Gloria.CAM.ORG (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA11632; Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:02:15 -0400 Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:02:15 -0400 (EDT) From: Marc Tardif To: Shawn Barnhart Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: clustering and netbooting In-Reply-To: <028f01bfaf90$40941060$b8209fc0@marlowe> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > | Problem is: how can I avoid having to build/install world and, to a lesser > | extent, the kernel for each machine (same hardware)? > | > | Solution 1: netbooting > [snip] > | Solution 2: mounting directories from fstab > [snip] > > I've done variations of both, netbooting and nfs mounting key directories, > and while its a great solution for end-user type workstations, non-critical > servers or identical server farms, I've found that by focusing my points of > failure to one machine I increase my troubles, not decrease them when > dealing with critical services. > > Even if you have a rock-solid NFS setup, what happens when a make > installworld screws up? Do you want to lose all the machines, or just one > of them? Right, that's why I currently only buildworld on one machine and nfs mount /usr/src and /usr/obj on the other machines. Although I only have to installworld and rebuild the kernel once for each machine, this can become tedious for a farm of 10+ machines. Is there perhaps a way to automate the task of keeping the system up to date? Yahoo! probably has quite a large cluster of machines, do they keep up to date one machine at the time? Or how about this: could two machines act as boot servers for all the other machines? That way, if one fails, the other takes over provinding somewhat of a fail-safe environment. Not sure about that though... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message