Re: How to admin a network cluster?

[Sebastian Andersson <sa@hogia.net>]

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On Tue, 20 May 1997, Helmut Lichtenberg wrote:

[administrating many linux machines on a lan]

Depening on your network, your hardware and the level of security you
want/need there are many ways to set up this. I'd make the computers boot
from bootp/bootdisks, fetch their basic config and OS from a tftp server
and mount unfrequently used programs from an AFS/NFS server together with
the users' home directories. Something like this:

1) Boot from bootp,bootdisk.
2) Check the contents on the harddrive against a server. A version file in
   the root perhapps.

If the disk image is current, mount the hd as root and start from
that.

If the disk image is old, fetch a new one (a .tgz file?) with tftp and
install it on the harddrive, mount the hd as root and start from that.
The first thing the init scripts should do is to run a script that
configures the computer from the current IP address.
This reduces the problem to make one master filesystem on the server and
maintaining a script that configures the clients.
If you only want to run X clients, it is not much that needs to be
configured per client, is there?

On the server you've got to configure /etc/ethers /etc/hosts /etc/exports
(and maybe /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny ) for every new computer
you add to your lan. A good idea might be to use PAM on your clients for
all your authentication and let people authenticate themself against a
kerberos or radius server.

Also look at CMUs pages. They've got some experience with large unix
installations. They've got a package for package management.

/Sebastian

See http://www.hogia.net/keys/sa-pgp.asc for public pgp key.


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