(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
Hello All, Since one year now, the Alinka team has been writing a weekly summary of the activity in mailing-lists relative to linux clustering (such as beowulf, linux virtual server, linux-ha or journaling file systems) and general clustering news. This "digest" is provided freely as a weekly email from clustering_at_alinka.com and is intended to give a good overview of the linux clustering news for people without enough time to read all about it. As the ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter covers this mailing-list, and as many of you readers of this list might not even know that the ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter exists (We had an annoucement last year on the mailing-lists, but we did not make any other posts), I take the opportunity of the first birthday of the ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter to tell you about it. Here is a sample of the ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter. If you like it, you can subscribe to the list: send an e-mail to clustering_at_alinka.com from the address you wish to subscribe, with the word "subscribe" in the subject. -----------The ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter------------- The ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter, Wednesday, April the 11th. 2001 by Antoine Brenner (abrenner_at_alinka.com) Dear readers, I am happy to send you this week's edition of clustering_at_alinka.com This edition is the 52th since we started the Letter: this is also first birthday of the ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter ! clustering_at_alinka.com is a free weekly e-mail newsletter on linux clustering. It provides a summary of the weekly activity in mailing-lists relative to linux clustering (such as beowulf, linux virtual server or linux-ha) and general clustering news. For more information about ALINKA, see: http://www.alinka.com News from the High Performance world, by Dr Laurent Gatineau (lgatineau_at_alinka.com) ====================================================================== Tips and tricks from the Beowulf mailing list ======== * Scott Shealy [m1] seeks comparaison about P4 and Athlon. Some CPUs benchmarks were given [m3, m5], but as Josh Fryman [m2] explain it without a good compiler benchmarks could be not usefull. In the memory side, P4 have a good bandwith, see [m4, m6] [m1] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/150/5484689/ [m2] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/100/5489036/ [m3] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/150/5532781/ [m4] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/150/5486554/ [m5] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/100/5490088/ [m6] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/100/5492228/ * There was a long thread about what tools to use for cloning nodes. Some pointers were given: systemimager [1], lui [2], Scyld, kickstart from RedHat, Dolly [3], imgdisk [4], or just copy one hard drive on an other one... One can of course use Alinka Raisin [5] ! [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemimager/ [2] http://oss.software.ibm.com/lui [3] http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/patagonia/ [4] http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/systems/software/city/ [5] http://www.alinka.com/araisin.php3 * Don Morton [m1] was looking for information about PBS and PGI interactions. He answered himself [m2] and gave a pointer to an online documentation [1] [1] http://www.cs.umt.edu/~morton/PBS/ [m1] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/50/5507440/ [m2] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/50/5511697/ * J.W.Armstrong [m1] is looking for a parallel make for cluster. Greg Lindahl [m2] warn him because compiles are not always CPU bounds. Dean Carpenter [m3] gave a link to ANTS [1] (a load balancing system). Andreas Boklund [m4] gave results with MPmake and Mosix. [1] http://unthought.net/antsd/ [m1] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/50/5532806/ [m2] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/0/5533061/ [m3] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/0/5533381/ [m4] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/0/5536620/ * Javier Iglesias [m1] wants to build a cluster with two NICs per node, one for administration and one for computation. He is looking for advice. Robert G. Brown [m2] answered that on a cluster two NICs could not help for some applications. Peter H. Koenig [m3] and Dr O. Parchment [m4] gave two links two similar architecture [1,2]. [1] http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/urz/anwendungen/CLIC/index.php3?lang=en [2] http://www.soton.ac.uk/~sucsweb/Research/Metropolis [m1] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/3/50/5479935/ [m2] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/150/5482880/ [m3] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/100/5490272/ [m4] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/100/5490384/ * Wes Wells [m1] is looking for an alternative to NFS. Rob Latham [m2] gave its opinion about some solutions. Jag [m3] and Greg Lindahl [m4] wrote that AFS could have some limitations depending on what is needed. [m1] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/50/5517812/ [m2] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/0/5518993/ [m3] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/0/5519315/ [m4] http://geocrawler.com/archives/3/423/2001/4/0/5530241/ News from the High Availability world, by Guillaume GIMENEZ (ggimenez_at_alinka.com) ====================================================================== drbd ======== * Ard van Breemen said [m1] that drbd and PostgreSQL 7.1 will be made for eachother. [m1] http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/3756/0/5522029/ * Mike Debreceni advise us that PostgreSQL before 7.1 is very slow with protocol C. [m2] http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/3756/0/5515718/ [m3] http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/3756/0/5520220/ LVS ======== * Wensong Zhang announces [m4] ipvs release 0.2.9 for kernel 2.4 is available on LVS website [1]. [1] http://www.LinuxVirtualServer.org/ [m4] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=98705209023369&w=2 * Mike keefe posted [m5] a performance evaluation of LVS. [m5] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=98685085410292&w=2 News on the Filesystems front, by Ludovic Ishiomin (lishiomin_at_alinka.com) ====================================================================== Coda ===== * Clemens Hermann wanted to know if he could use Coda to do mail replication [1m]. Jan Harkes answered that Coda can give surprises on reintegration and gave the URL of unisson [1] [2m]. * Steffen Neumann succeeded to build a prototype of a backup solution of a Coda server, but had some concerns about large scale Backup [3m]. * Steffen Schaefer asked if it is possible to change the Venus timeout. Jan Harles answered that it is possible but not adviseable because of the protocol used by RPC2 [4m]. * Dermot Cassidy had problems to configure and run its updateclnt/updatesrv daemon [5m]. * Steffen Neumann gave some tips about management of volumes on Coda and ACLs [6m]. * Oliver had some configuration questions on how to setup a replicated volume [7m]. Jan Harkes gave explanations about VSG and how it is used on clients and servers [8m]. * David Petterson had problems running procmail (can't read .procmailrc in the home directory) [9m]. Jan Harkes described its configuration that runs without any problems [10m]. [1m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0264.html [2m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0265.html [3m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0270.html [4m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0275.html [5m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0276.html and the followings. [6m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0282.html [8m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0281.html [9m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0286.html [10m] http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/codalist-2001/0284.html [1] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ GFS ===== * Anne Malicia had some questions about page cache management in GFS for the 2.4 kernel [11m]. It appears she found a bug [12m]. * There was a thread about the implementation of flock() in GFS which leaves the process in D-state (that increase the load of the machine) [13m]. Eventually, Mike Tilstra modified the code so that only one process is in a D state [14m]. * Gil Shallom asked about Callback policy and pointed that it has a big impact about performance [15m]. Ken Preslan detailed the one adopted in GFS [16m]. * David Zafman detailed features of the in-kernel membership service written by Compaq and announced that it should be released in Open Source [17m]. David Teigland enjoyed the announce [18m]. Jeff Darcy was not convinced by in-kernel membership, and felt that it is better to stay in user space [19m]. * There was a technical thread about integration of IBM DLM and GFS [20m]. [11m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001931.html [12m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001940.html [13m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001929.html and the followings. [14m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001941.html [15m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001930.html [16m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001937.html [17m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001939.html [18m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001942.html [19m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001943.html [20m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/gfs-devel/2001-April/001946.html and the followings. Intermezzo ===== * Vladimir Ivaschenko was not able to get to the b1_0_0 branch of the cvs [21m]. Shirish Patak gave the tip [22m]. [21m] http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/8077/2001/4/0/5528423/ [22m] http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/8077/2001/4/0/5530462/ JFS ===== * Andreww Klaasseen wanted to know how close to production release is JFS. Steve Best gave the plans [23m]. * James Lewis Nance reported the same problems he found with earlier drop when building mozilla with the latest JFS drop [24m]. [23m] http://oss.software.ibm.com/pipermail/jfs-discussion/2001-April/000195.html [24m] http://oss.software.ibm.com/pipermail/jfs-discussion/2001-April/000196.html LVM ===== * Arthur Viak reported problems with vgcreate [25m]. Holger Grothe asnwered that a kernel upgrade is needed [26m]. * Jonathan DeHaan upgraded from beta5 to beta6 and had problems with vgscan [27m]. Andreas Dilger advices to use beta5 patch with beta5 tools [28m]. * There was a thread about the way to patch 2.2.19 with LVM [29m]. * Jorg de Jong announced lvmgui 0.3 [30m]. * Terje Kvernes announced the development of a LVM library in Perl [31m]. * Heinz Mauelshagen announced LVM 0.9.1beta7 [32m]. snapshot [33m]. Heinz Mauelshagen confirmed that it is an old bug which is fixed in the latest version [34m]. [25m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006606.html [26m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006609.html [27m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006597.html [28m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006601.html [29m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006615.html [30m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006620.html [31m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006628.html [32m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006629.html [33m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006639.html [34m] http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2001-April/006640.html XFS ===== * Brandy Dawkins asked if Oracle runs fine on XFS [35m]. Adam Cioccarelli related its experience [36m] and Steve Lord added that direct IO available with XFS should be a great interest to Oracle [37m]. * Stephen Adler reported its very good experience with XFS [38m]. * Ed McKenzie was unable to mount an XFS partition by label. After a bit of investigation, he had the same problem with ext2 partition, and concluded that the problem comes from mount and devfsd [39m]. * Ryo Ono wanted to partition a disk with XFS so that it would be readable on both Irix and Linux [40m]. Nathan Scott recommended to use the fx utility on Irix [41m], because fdisk on Linux does not handle properly the SGI disklabel [42m], although the kernel recognizes themp properly [43m]. * Thomas Graichen asked if LVM snapshoting is planned for XFS. Steve Lord answered that this feature is planned, bu there still a lot of work to stabilize XFS. He also announced that Peter Braam is working on integrating snapfs and Intermezzo with XFS [44m]. * Lennert Buytenhek found a bug with XFS and named pipe [45m]. Steve Lord confirmed it and hacked the cvs to correct it [46m]. * Doug wanted to know if CXFS (Clustered XFS filesystem) would be ported to Linux. Steve Lord announced that a port is planned [47m]. * Justin Tripp reported a weird behavior on a NFS exported XFS filesystem [48m]. Steve Lord confirmed the problem and sent a patch [49m] which resolved the problem [50m]. Later Ajay Shekhawat reported a oops on its NFS server exporting an XFS volume [51m]. * Kenneth Leung tried the new RedHat Wolverine ISO image with XFS support provided by SGI (0.10 prerelease) and found a problem with automount [52m]. Russel Catalan confirmed this is a RedHat Wolverine issue [53m]. * Petru Paler was unable to compile XFS on a sparc64 box. He had to add a #include in a XFS file [54m]. Later he reported an oops during XFS recovery [55m]. [35m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00039.html [36m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00040.html [37m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00041.html [38m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00064.html [39m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00127.html [40m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00161.html [41m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00181.html [42m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00267.html [43m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00162.html [44m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00190.html [45m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00220.html [46m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00248.html [47m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00297.html [48m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00260.html [49m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00261.html [50m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00274.html [51m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00278.html [52m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00288.html [53m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00299.html [54m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00292.html [55m] http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail_archive/0104/msg00305.html ====================================================================== To subscribe to the list, send e-mail to clustering_at_alinka.com from the address you wish to subscribe, with the word "subscribe" in the subject. To unsubscribe from the list, send e-mail to clustering_at_alinka.com from the address you wish to unsubscribe from, with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject. Alinka is the editor of the ALINKA ORANGES and ALINKA RAISIN administration software for Linux clusters. (Web site: http://www.alinka.com )Received on 2001-04-18 11:59:19