OM Assistance

Hi OM General List :)

I hope you guys n gals can help a hardened stupid ol Londoner with a silly 
little problem I am having :)

In a previous life I used to manage a company that was running (just under) a 
400 node OpenMosix cluster. All the PC's were 2nd hand PIII's and came from 
auction.

That life of mine is now over and I miss it, so I have decided to try and 
rebuild the cluster (albeit in a smaller form) in my new job / incarnation.

I have set up 2 racks of Dexion shelviing with 32 Compaq ENS PIII machines on 
each, with a 3rd rack ready to be deployed when funds allow another trip to the 
auction. Both racks are now cabled up, machines in place and a gigabit backbone 
between them set up, with the machines ready to speak across their standard 
10Mb (although a few have 100Mb) onboard cards.

I have a picture in my head, that was similar to my previous job (although a 
smaller set up),  where we have 2 servers, running a standard (apart from the 
kernel and userland tools) LAMP style setup as our main route into the cluster. 
The rest of the machines in the cluster boot from the hard drive (The machines 
will not be used for any other purpose than the benefit of the cluster) with as 
minimal an installation as is possible. I should say that most of the machines 
don't have a CD drive and only a floppy / hard drive as their available, 
writeable media.

So on I went, happy in my ignorance of the challenge ahead.  My problem is that 
I hadn't realised that the OM project was at a hiatus in its life and since 
finding this out have dug a little further and happily seen that work is 
underway on a 2.6 kernel version as well as the 2.4 kernel version still 
existing.

So my questions, prefaced by some more qualifiers are as follows:

Qualifier #1. I am an not a total idiot, but partial is a fair explanation and 
I may well stumble at recompiling kernels.

Qualifier #2. I don't have lots and lots of money but I do have a fair amount 
of sweat to offer and "some" wonga.

Qualifier #3. The machines live in a private 192.168.***.*** network, 
frontended by a Smoothwall 3 firewall, router, DHCP etc. box (non OM kernel) 
that gives them access to the internet.

Question #1. Shall I install the 2.4 or 2.6 based OM kernels ?

Question #2. Due to my previous Qualifier #1. What manner shall I install to 
both the node machines and "entry point" servers?

Question #3. Can I help with the project (either 2.4 or 2.6 branches) ?


Thanks in advance and I look forward to speaking with you all soon :)

Jason Duke

Strange Logic


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