Re: inventory

["David L. Nicol" <david@kasey.umkc.edu>]

Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> now that a sizable group (around 50?) people has gathered on
> the list, maybe we could start making an inventory of which
> cluster services the various projects have and which they are
> lacking...

Or at least defining what is and is not a "cluster service."
For instance, PVM and rsh, as beautiful and useful as they
are, do not require any blurring of the line between what is running
in which box.

So although I'm sure we'd all like to converge on a standard rsh delegation
shell (rshsh) that wisely chooses a peer for running the next instruction
in its command stream, rshsh would be a user mode tool which would only
require a shared file system and configured rshd.  The internals of rshsh
would not be on topic here, although we would appreciate the announcement
and name under which we can find it on freshmeat.

> I'm pretty sure we can remove some items from the TODO lists
> after seeing which of each other's already written components
> are usable ;)

It's stunning the level of not-made-here-itis that these projects
can accumulate.


Lets focus on one thing that we know all clustering schemes have, and
see if we can standardize it, then go from there.  My nominee of a
suitable case for this treatment remains node numbering.

Consensus appears that there is a standard file that can be read from
to determine one's node number, or written to to change it.

Mosix "clutters up" /proc with all of its controls and displays; and
it has been suggested that it is preferable to define a New File System
for a clustering architecture's controls and mount it somewhere rather
than doing this.  I like this approach since not only does it reduce
the amount of patching (new clusterfs instead of altered procfs) it
trivially allows participation in multiple clusters by mounting multiple
clusterfses at multiple places

Are all in agreeement with the above notes and ideas?

-- 
                      David Nicol 816.235.1187 dnicol@cstp.umkc.edu
                           Damn! Someone stole my book on security!


Linux-cluster: generic cluster infrastructure for Linux
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