[wplug-bsd] FreeBSD clusters

Poyner, Brandon bpoyner at ccac.edu
Tue Nov 11 09:32:28 EST 2003


What I would like to see is a good, inexpensive FreeBSD High
Availability cluster.  While you can get far with FreeBSD using PXE boot
(diskless servers), NFS mounting a NAS and a load balancer, it has
weaknesses that can make the cluster not-so high availability and/or
expensive.  For instance, if the NFS server offering up the NFS root
partition goes down all the servers mounting that point effectively go
down with it.  Linux has good, inexpensive HA solution with a
combination of DRBD and Heartbeat.

Does anybody here have experience with shared SCSI storage?  I'm
thinking of something along the lines of the Winchester Systems
Flashdisk units.

http://www.winsys.com/products/flopenraid.php

Brandon Poyner
Network Engineer II
CCAC - College Office
412-237-3086


-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Moran [mailto:wmoran at potentialtech.com] 
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 3:55 PM
To: Carl Benedict
Cc: wplug-bsd at wplug.org
Subject: Re: [wplug-bsd] FreeBSD clusters


Carl Benedict wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
>     After a discussion today over the demise of Red Hat Linux, I came
> across this article on clustering with FreeBSD.  
> 
> http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster/
> 
> I found this to be an interesting read for anyone who's done work with
> Beowulf clusters.  

This kind of things is more fun than should be legal.

Years ago, I got ahold of a bunch of obsolete 386s that a local bank was
pitching.  I had this great dream that I would build a Beowulf cluster,
but alas, it was not to be ... most of the machines were unreliable, and
I never did have the time to organize the whole thing.

What a joy it would be to have a job where you could put together 150
node clusters with your OS of choice ...

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com

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