Diskless Cluster Setup

This page shows how to setup a diskless cluster that uses UnionFS to consolidate system and cluster software in a single disk image.

Install a kernel

You must build the kernel locally, otherwise the unionfs install will fail later.

• Download kernel source v. 2.6.15.6 (or anything 2.6 before 2.6.16) from kernel.org
• Get a config for your kernel. If you're using the pegasos machines, use pegasos-debian from ppckernel.org
• Untar the sources in /usr/src/linux-2.6.15.6 (should be a more permanent location)
• Copy the config to /usr/src/linux-2.6.15.6/.config
• Then:

cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.15.6
make oldconfig
make
cp arch/ppc/boot/images/zImage.chrp /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15.6
make modules_install

Install unionfs

You must build unionfs with the same gcc compiler as you used to build the kernel above, otherwise you'll get an error about "Invalid module format."

• Download the unionfs sources from http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-unionfs.html
• Untar them, cd into the resulting directory, and then simply type make and then make install

Now you should be able to modprobe unionfs

See http://www.unionfs.org/ for usage examples.

Busybox

Download and build Busybox:

make defconfig
make menuconfig #make a statically linked binary
make
make install #this creates the _install directory

Now create some necessary directories:

cd _install
mkdir dev proc sys mnt
cd ..

Now, put the _install directory somewhere that it can be NFS mounted, e.g., /client/setup