Re: Hardware advice: seeking echoes of running Linux-PC clusters
>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen Early <sde1000@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk> writes:
Stephen> An alternative is to make the PCs diskless (or nearly
Stephen> diskless - /tmp and swap on local disk) workstations and
Stephen> administration considerably easier, and avoid the chance
Stephen> of individual systems getting messed up by user
Stephen> stupidity.
>From the point of view of security, do you really need a diskless
system? If you set a bios password, set the bios to boot only from C
and make sure that a password is required to enter single user mode,
wouldn't that be just as secure? Or is there a loophole which I
missed (not having tried this type of setup)?
And how do you administer you diskless clients? If you share /usr, how
do you upgrade the root file system of the clients? If I remember
correctly, the current version of dpkg doesn't support installing with
a read-only /usr. On the other hand, I have to admit that I don't know
what is the best way to upgrade a large number of machines with dpkg.
The problem I see is that some postinst scripts are intercative, so I
have to answer the same questions for each machine I want to
upgrade. For a large cluster, this can be somewhat tiring and time
consuming. I have been thinking of using an expect script as a
frontend to answer all the questions. But so far, nothing came out of
this.
cheers,
Lukas
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Dr. Lukas Nellen | Email: lukas@teorica0.ifisicacu.unam.mx
Depto. de Fisica Teorica, IFUNAM |
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