Re: 2500 Linux workstation !
On Fri, Jul 28, 2000 at 10:00:59AM -0700, Simon Tennant wrote: Multiply that by 2500 and that's 75G of data transfer, it would be 2 hours of network transfer on 100baseT if you didn't have timeouts and retransmits. Of course with that load you would have heaps of timeouts and it would take much longer... Catalan, The Pre-Boot eXecution Environment (PXE) could also make your life simpler. As the name suggests you could download a fresh image to the hard disk every couple of days/reboots and then boot locally. This way if you are ever worried about the integrity of a machine just pull down a disk image you trust. PXE is also supposed to be more Windows friendly if you have users that way inclined. Nilo (www.nilo.org), the successor to the netboot and the etherboot projects has PXE support. There is also bpbatch - www.bpbatch.org com? which is a PXE extension. I use it for full automated installation and bootp/tftp booting the debian installserver. Flo -- Florian Lohoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] +49-5201-669912 If you're not having fun right now, you're wasting your time.
Re: 2500 Linux workstation !
On Thu, 27 Jul 2000, Catalin Ciocoiu wrote: In a slashdot articol somebody lace a interesing question What is the best solution for a network width 2500 Linux WorkStation ? I proposed a diskless workstation sollution becose is very robust sollution. Is it a good sollution What filesystem can be used for file sharing ?? Is NFS ok ??? What kind of authentification can be used in this network ? I waiting your answares !! One problem with diskless workstations is the issue of what happend when they all reboot simultaneously (EG power failure). I suggest that you setup a diskless workstation that is fully configured (X, xdm, etc), reboot it and track the amount of data transfer that is required. I guess that it might be about 30M of data access on disk. Multiply that by 2500 and that's 75G of data transfer, it would be 2 hours of network transfer on 100baseT if you didn't have timeouts and retransmits. Of course with that load you would have heaps of timeouts and it would take much longer... The good thing about diskless booting is that all machines will access mostly the same files if you have it configured correctly. The boot space of a diskless machine should fit into cache on the server (so disk bandwidth shouldn't be an issue). If you have a server with 10 * 100baseT network interfaces or 1 * 1G interface (the most that the bus bandwidth of typical PC servers can handle) then it could possibly handle 800 PCs for booting in a reasonable amount of time (5-10 minutes). So if you had 4 such machines for running the boot process (IE the root file system) and another set of machines for /home (which is much harder because the data is more important) then it could be workable. One thing I have been thinking of doing (an item on my almost infinitely long todo list) is to hack a kernel to log the details of file access (file name and the operation (read/write/etc) and the amount of data to klog and then have a modified klogd write this data to a file which is outside this logging (can't have it logging it's own accesses ;). Then I could boot the machine (NB would need a extra-large klogd buffer to capture file access before klogd had been loaded) and find out how much disk access really happens at boot. -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: 2500 Linux workstation !
On Thu, 27 Jul 2000, Catalin Ciocoiu wrote: In a slashdot articol somebody lace a interesing question What is the best solution for a network width 2500 Linux WorkStation ? I proposed a diskless workstation sollution becose is very robust sollution. Is it a good sollution What filesystem can be used for file sharing ?? Is NFS ok ??? What kind of authentification can be used in this network ? I waiting your answares !! One problem with diskless workstations is the issue of what happend when they all reboot simultaneously (EG power failure). I suggest that you setup a diskless workstation that is fully configured (X, xdm, etc), reboot it and track the amount of data transfer that is required. I guess that it might be about 30M of data access on disk. Multiply that by 2500 and that's 75G of data transfer, it would be 2 hours of network transfer on 100baseT if you didn't have timeouts and retransmits. Of course with that load you would have heaps of timeouts and it would take much longer... The good thing about diskless booting is that all machines will access mostly the same files if you have it configured correctly. The boot space of a diskless machine should fit into cache on the server (so disk bandwidth shouldn't be an issue). If you have a server with 10 * 100baseT network interfaces or 1 * 1G interface (the most that the bus bandwidth of typical PC servers can handle) then it could possibly handle 800 PCs for booting in a reasonable amount of time (5-10 minutes). So if you had 4 such machines for running the boot process (IE the root file system) and another set of machines for /home (which is much harder because the data is more important) then it could be workable. One thing I have been thinking of doing (an item on my almost infinitely long todo list) is to hack a kernel to log the details of file access (file name and the operation (read/write/etc) and the amount of data to klog and then have a modified klogd write this data to a file which is outside this logging (can't have it logging it's own accesses ;). Then I could boot the machine (NB would need a extra-large klogd buffer to capture file access before klogd had been loaded) and find out how much disk access really happens at boot. -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: 2500 Linux workstation !
On Thu, 27 Jul 2000, Catalin Ciocoiu wrote: In a slashdot articol somebody lace a interesing question What is the best solution for a network width 2500 Linux WorkStation ? I proposed a diskless workstation sollution becose is very robust sollution. Is it a good sollution What filesystem can be used for file sharing ?? Is NFS ok ??? What kind of authentification can be used in this network ? I waiting your answares !! One problem with diskless workstations is the issue of what happend when they all reboot simultaneously (EG power failure). I suggest that you setup a diskless workstation that is fully configured (X, xdm, etc), reboot it and track the amount of data transfer that is required. I guess that it might be about 30M of data access on disk. Multiply that by 2500 and that's 75G of data transfer, it would be 2 hours of network transfer on 100baseT if you didn't have timeouts and retransmits. Of course with that load you would have heaps of timeouts and it would take much longer... The good thing about diskless booting is that all machines will access mostly the same files if you have it configured correctly. The boot space of a diskless machine should fit into cache on the server (so disk bandwidth shouldn't be an issue). If you have a server with 10 * 100baseT network interfaces or 1 * 1G interface (the most that the bus bandwidth of typical PC servers can handle) then it could possibly handle 800 PCs for booting in a reasonable amount of time (5-10 minutes). So if you had 4 such machines for running the boot process (IE the root file system) and another set of machines for /home (which is much harder because the data is more important) then it could be workable. One thing I have been thinking of doing (an item on my almost infinitely long todo list) is to hack a kernel to log the details of file access (file name and the operation (read/write/etc) and the amount of data to klog and then have a modified klogd write this data to a file which is outside this logging (can't have it logging it's own accesses ;). Then I could boot the machine (NB would need a extra-large klogd buffer to capture file access before klogd had been loaded) and find out how much disk access really happens at boot. -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X
Re: 2500 Linux workstation !
Russell Coker wrote: On Thu, 27 Jul 2000, Catalin Ciocoiu wrote: In a slashdot articol somebody lace a interesing question What is the best solution for a network width 2500 Linux WorkStation ? I proposed a diskless workstation sollution becose is very robust sollution. Is it a good sollution What filesystem can be used for file sharing ?? Is NFS ok ??? What kind of authentification can be used in this network ? I waiting your answares !! One problem with diskless workstations is the issue of what happend when they all reboot simultaneously (EG power failure). I suggest that you setup a diskless workstation that is fully configured (X, xdm, etc), reboot it and track the amount of data transfer that is required. I guess that it might be about 30M of data access on disk. Multiply that by 2500 and that's 75G of data transfer, it would be 2 hours of network transfer on 100baseT if you didn't have timeouts and retransmits. Of course with that load you would have heaps of timeouts and it would take much longer... Whell On this network can be more than 1 fileserver and the traffic can be splited on more network segment. One file server for 50-100 station can be ok ! The file server for 100 station is on the same net segment width the station. This can reduce subtantial net traffic over segments. The /usr dir can be the same. And most files on the slash can be hard link for the same inod( eg: /bin/ls ). The good thing about diskless booting is that all machines will access mostly the same files if you have it configured correctly. The boot space of a diskless machine should fit into cache on the server (so disk bandwidth shouldn't be an issue). If you have a server with 10 * 100baseT network interfaces or 1 * 1G interface (the most that the bus bandwidth of typical PC servers can handle) then it could possibly handle 800 PCs for booting in a reasonable amount of time (5-10 minutes). So if you had 4 such machines for running the boot process (IE the root file system) and another set of machines for /home (which is much harder because the data is more important) then it could be workable. One thing I have been thinking of doing (an item on my almost infinitely long todo list) is to hack a kernel to log the details of file access (file name and the operation (read/write/etc) and the amount of data to klog and then have a modified klogd write this data to a file which is outside this logging (can't have it logging it's own accesses ;). Then I could boot the machine (NB would need a extra-large klogd buffer to capture file access before klogd had been loaded) and find out how much disk access really happens at boot. -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: 2500 Linux workstation !
Multiply that by 2500 and that's 75G of data transfer, it would be 2 hours of network transfer on 100baseT if you didn't have timeouts and retransmits. Of course with that load you would have heaps of timeouts and it would take much longer... Catalan, The Pre-Boot eXecution Environment (PXE) could also make your life simpler. As the name suggests you could download a fresh image to the hard disk every couple of days/reboots and then boot locally. This way if you are ever worried about the integrity of a machine just pull down a disk image you trust. PXE is also supposed to be more Windows friendly if you have users that way inclined. Nilo (www.nilo.org), the successor to the netboot and the etherboot projects has PXE support. HTH S. -- Simon Tennant, Linuxcare, Inc. 415.577.6719 tel, 415.701.7457 fax pgp id: 05F76248FF62442C4D0010C09851C0746410974D Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.
2500 Linux workstation !
In a slashdot articol somebody lace a interesing question What is the best solution for a network width 2500 Linux WorkStation ? I proposed a diskless workstation sollution becose is very robust sollution. Is it a good sollution What filesystem can be used for file sharing ?? Is NFS ok ??? What kind of authentification can be used in this network ? I waiting your answares !!
