[Rocks-Discuss] docs about appliance types?

[Lana Deere]

I was looking at the Rocks documentation and in the section on
insert-ethers it shows a selection of appliance types: compute nodes,
pvfs nodes, NAS nodes, etc. Is there documentation anywhere about
what the different kinds of appliances are and how they vary in their
configuration? I didn't see much detail, but I could easily have
missed the right section. Does using insert-ethers with the appliance
type only matter if the node wants to PXE boot? I.e., I could add a
storage box to my cluster and wouldn't have to use insert-ethers,
rather I could just assign it a static IP address?

Thanks!

.. Lana

[Bart Brashers]

There's no documentation that I know for the appliances other than the compute appliance. Most of the other appliances should be relatively obvious what they do, given the name.

Insert-ethers' main job is to take a MAC address of something that's PXE booting, and insert it into the Rocks database. Then Rocks decides what to do with the PXE request. The FE might simply hand it an IP address (for a manages switch that want one, e.g. an "Ethernet Switches" appliance), or it might send it a kickstart image (for compute and NAS appliances), etc.

Yes, you can add an external NFS-server ("storage box") as long as you handle things like username/password synchronization (or set it up to mount with no security) and handle the IP/hostname lookups. You can add external boxes in /etc/hosts.local, which is a persistent file (unlike /etc/hosts, which gets over-written during a "rocks sync users"). Just be aware of routes: you probably don't want all the NFS traffic from the computes going through the FE. You probably want to put a NIC in the NFS server and assign it an IP in the private IP range of our cluster, so the computes can talk to it directly.

I've been using NAS nodes for years, they are pretty easy. I set up a 2nd NIC on the NAS node to have an IP on my public LAN, and run Samba, so non-cluster machines running various OS's can access the data.

So which is easier? If you already have a functioning NFS-server, hack it into Rocks. If you're building a new one, install it as a NAS node and hack it into the rest of your LAN.

My $0.02.

Bart

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[Lana Deere]

Thanks!

.. Lana (lana....@gmail.com)

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Bart Brashers <bbra...@environcorp.com> wrote:
> There's no documentation that I know for the appliances other than the compute appliance.  Most of the other appliances should be relatively obvious what they do, given the name.

[....]