From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 26 9: 5:59 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mercury.campbell-mithun.com (Mercury.campbell-mithun.com [192.159.32.151]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 91CE837BEA1 for ; Wed, 26 Apr 2000 09:05:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from swb@accord.grasslake.net) Received: from accord.grasslake.net (accord.grasslake.net [206.11.249.240]) by mercury.campbell-mithun.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id LAA22000; Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:05:52 -0500 Received: from localhost (swb@localhost) by accord.grasslake.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA13239; Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:05:58 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from swb@accord.grasslake.net) Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:05:57 -0500 (CDT) From: Shawn Barnhart To: Marc Tardif Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: clustering and netbooting In-Reply-To: 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 On Wed, 26 Apr 2000, Marc Tardif wrote: > 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? You made it sound as if you had three machines tasked for three tasks, not a farm of 10+ machines performing the same task. I think I'd approach a cloning strategy differently if that was the case. > 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... You'd need some kind of loadsharing device that would be able to redirect calls. Overall, if you're only talking about three machines, I think the overhead and risks associated with making your other two totally dependant on the first is more time and effort spent that doing independent make buildworlds. If you really have a farm, maybe think about disk cloning or some other type of strategy. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message