OpenMosix cluster with Mandrakes 9.1?
 

Has anybody managed to use OpenMosix with Mandrake 9.1? OpenMosix is very interesting type of cluster, easy to use and makes kind of multi-CPU configuration over LAN using available PC's. No special programming needed. Load balancing happens automagically ;-) If you want to get impression what OpenMosix is about, get Quantian Knoppix (surprisingly it is prohibited in this forum to give URL?! ) and give it a try, it's well worth it. No installation, as usual with Knoppix'es, boot'em from CD and they start working, forming OpenMosix cluster if you used several PC's. Oh yes... it's Debian :-) but nevertheless... BTW I would gladly use kind of Knoppix made from Mandrake but AFAIK there is no such thing (yet).

To use OpenMosix permanently with Mandrake, basically there should be a patched kernel available (OpenMosix patch in addition to all other Mandrake patches), rpm containing some libraries and rpm's containing some essential OpenMosix - related utilities, specially OpenMosixView. Currently Club area of rpm's contains only rpm with libraries, and they are named differently compared to those used in utilities, see OpenMosix www site (again, URL prohibited here :-O but get it by Google). There is bare kernel with OpenMosix patch available from OpenMosix site but I would better use kernel patched and tested by Mandrake in the first place and then by OpenMosix.

So anyone with better experience to make OpenMosix cluster from Mandrakes 9.1? If so how did you get kernel and utilities?

from openmosix documentation @ http://howto.ipng.be/openMosix-HOWTO/x313.html ...

Always use pure vanilla kernel-sources from http://www.kernel.org/ to compile an openMosix kernel! Please be kind enough to download the kernel using a mirror near to you and always try and download patches to the latest kernel sources you do have instead of downloading the whole thing. This is going to be much appreciated by the Linux community and will greatly increase your geeky Karma ;-) Be sure to use the right openMosix patch depending on the kernel-version. At the moment I write this, the latest 2.4 kernel is 2.4.20 so you should download the openMosix-2.4.20-x.gz patch, where the "x" stands for the patch revision (ie: the greater the revision number, the most recent it is). Do not use the kernel that comes with any Linux-distribution: it won't work. These kernel sources get heavily patched by the distribution-makers so, applying the openMosix patch to such a kernel is going to fail for sure! Been there, done that: trust me ;-)

btw, mandrake will work with a vanilla kernel. good luck.

--cheers

Thank you... I somehow knew that first response I will receive on this website will be RTFM. Thanks anyway.

Mandrake somehow works with "vanilla kernel" with OpenMosix patch but it works poorly. I use MDK as everydays environment as _user_ and use it a lot, including XFS file system on a big 360 Gb 3ware RAID and so on. With vanilla kernel MDK crashes several times a week, and that's much too much for me. Distribution e.g. 9.1 works normally (doesn't crash) and I most certainly want to continue to use _that_ "heavily patched" mdk kernel. I only want, as a choice, to have _also_ OpenMosix patch. Probably somebody has done it already. Best of all if he/she made .rpm.

Mind you I am not Linux guru. If I would be qualified enough to apply all these Mandrake and other patches, recompile kernel etc. then I probably wouldn't ask. But I am not (yet :)

OpenMosix and Mandrake
 

Does anybody know if there is already a OpenMosix.rpm to patch Mandrake's kernel?
Is it working properly?

As far as I know Mandrake has never published any OpenMosix-patched kernel despite of several promises to do so. When Deno worked for Mandrake, he even had turned status dor OpenMosix patched kernel to "Done" - see

http://www.mandrakeclub.com/modules....c=5684&forum=6

However the patched kernel never was available even for Mandrake Club members. Nobody from Mandrake has ever answered my e-mails asking about OpenMosix in Mandrake. "Advice" to use plain vanilla kernel with OpenMosix patch without Mandrake patches is bad and unwise because you wll get unstable system which lacks many of Mandrake features.

If anybody knows more how to use OpenMosix patch with "already heavily patched" Mandrake kernel, please give a link or describe how to do that.

Sofar when I need clustering to solve some problems I use CD-bootable Cluster Knoppix (which is Debian). Debian does not make any big secrets about OpenMosix like Mandrake does. Clusters are formed automatically with Cluster Knoppix and they just work.

They probably prefer you use their clustering solution, CLIC: http://clic.mandrakesoft.com/download.html
I haven't tried it myself.

Thanks for the link. There are different types of clusters... I most certainly do not need cluster like "large scientific computers". For what I have tried, OpenMosix is definitely the way to go for me and probably many other users should they know about such possibilities. It is very easy to try: just download Cluster Knoppix, burn several identical CD's, load some PC's sitting at the same LAN segment under DHCP, and your OpenMosix cluster is ready to work. Definitely worth trying! I was really amazed when tried it first time.

The CLICK website does not seem to provide any meaningful comparative analysis between CLICK and other clustering solutions. In fact I couldn't find even description what kind of cluster CLICK really is and what are tech/soft specifications. Have you read any?

All I know is what they have on their website. They sell a boxed version under the MandrakeClustering name:
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/clustering

The interesting paragraph (to me) was:
"Thanks to PXE technology, MandrakeClustering can be quickly installed. Complete deployment is possible in only a few minutes with the help of Clusterautosetup and Kadeploy utilities. URPMI -- the Mandrake package management system and dependency solver -- has been parallelized to allow automated software updating of all nodes simultaneously. "

A cluster you can install in minutes and update software on all nodes simultaneously... sounds good to me. ;) I don't do crash simulations either, though. I'm more interested in load balancing and high availability for web and database servers.

Crito >"A cluster you can install in minutes and update software on all nodes simultaneously... sounds good to me."

Just like OpenMosix, except OpenMosix is free. Take a look on
http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/ and
http://bofh.be/clusterknoppix/

Short quote from ClusterKnoppix page:
ClusterKnoppix is a modified Knoppix distro using the OpenMosix kernel.

Features:
* OpenMosix terminal server - uses PXE, DHCP and tftp to boot linux clients via the network.
* No cdrom drive/harddisk/floppy needed for the clients
openMosix autodiscovery - new nodes automatically join the cluster (no configuration needed)
* Cluster Management tools - openMosix userland/openMosixview Every node has root access to every other node via ssh/RSAkeys
MFS/dfsa support
* Every node can run full blown X (PC-room/demo setup) or console only (more memory available)

OpenMosix has been known for years. These kernels are available for most distributions. Seems that only Mandrake still thinks that clustering is kinda luxury when in fact OpenMosix cluster simply allows to use existing computing power more effectively. For example some PC group which is not used otherwise after working hours.

The EtherBoot feature sounds neat, but that would really only be good for computational tasks. I need something more like this project: http://linux-ha.org/

The CLIC project is a nice effort, but I was told that it uses the same technology as the beowulf clusters. Therefore, you will have to have the source code for all the aplications you want to run in the cluster so that you could recompiled them under the CLIC environment. With OpenMosix you do not need to do that.
ClusterKnoppix is a nice option too, I even installed it on my hard drive. Then, I realized that adding any debian package or application was not possible at all. I do not understand exactly why, but it seems that the installation is in a compressed form.
Does any body know how to install ClusterKnoppix permanently without having that problem?

As far as making a cluster with openMosix. I did it last summer. If you just follow the instructions on the website you'll find it's really simple to patch the kernel. Then just compile it. If this intimidates you a little don't worry, just find a little documentation on the subject and it's really easy. All of the utilities like openmosix view and openmosix web view install really easily too. Good luck.

soup

soup> "you'll find it's really simple to patch the kernel"

Did you patch Mandrake kernel (already coming with many patches) or "plain vanilla" universal kernel? Hopefully you have noticed that all this talk here is about OpenMosix-patched Mandrake kernels. Mandrake kernels are patched not just for phun, they contain many improvements and advantages compared to "plainn vanilla" kernel.

I still would like to have Mandrake kernel with all patches it has, plus OpenMosix patch. When there are several (or many) kernel patches it is not so simple to do and test.

well I believe I did it with the vanilla source. plus I was using slackware at the time. but you might as well try it with the mandrake kernel. my point was that it's pretty easy to get going.

soup> "my point was that it's pretty easy to get going."

Nope, it is NOT if you need to apply multiple distribution-specific patches to the same "vanilla" kernel and some of patches do influence each other.

Sure there are distribution-specific ready-to-use OpenMosix kernels for almost all "big" distributions EXCEPT Mandrake. That was the reason why all this talk started in the first place.

If somebody knows - preferrably by his own real experience - how to get OpenMosix-enabled Mandrake 9.2 Enterprise SMP kernel, I would love to hear from him/her either here or in e-mail to hbush@apollo.lv . Enterprise kernel is necessary because of memory usage limits of "ordinary" Mandrake kernels.

But if we remember that during several years there was no visible progress in OpenMosix usage with Mandrake kernels, it's more probably that I will sooner or later end up with Debian instead of Mandrake.