Setting up a UNIX cluster

[Brian Kim]

Dear Jan and Mickey,
Thank you both for your beautifully prompt and succinct responses. They have thoroughly answered the various facets of my inquiry...
@mickey: thanks for the cgynus suggestion. Never even considered the option...

Best,
bk


Best,
bk

> On Mar 10, 2014, at 10:29 AM, Jan Bramkamp <crest at rlwinm.de> wrote:
> 
>> On 10.03.2014 14:44, Brian Kim wrote:
>> Dear friends,
>> 
>> I am currently a teaching assistant for a freshman programming course at
>> Villanova University. Gloriously enough, we are teaching the C language.
>> The majority of the students have not had any previous experience in
>> programming so the extent of their computing knowledge is limited to the
>> grotesque Windows operating system that they have grown up with. Therefore,
>> before any discussion of programming begins, I want the students to be
>> familiarized with the UNIX environment so that they can gcc all their code
>> and not have to be chained down to IDE's.
>> In order to accomplish this, I have amassed a number of old Dell computers
>> that the department has long abandoned and I wish to set up a computer
>> cluster running FreeBSD. I personally do not have any experience in setting
>> up clusters and was hoping to request any instructional advice in this
>> regard.
>> I have come across this paper (
>> http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster.pdf) that
>> describes the process of setting up a BSD cluster with 300 nodes but I
>> found the language to be somewhat dense. There is also the fact that I do
>> not have any specialized hardware other than a bunch of old computers.
>> Assuming that I have a network switch, could anyone help me out with a
>> starting point?
> 
> 1. Configure a test system to boot from PXE.
> 2. Build a PXE boot environment for the test system with DHCP, TFTP and NFS.
> 3. Build a generic PXE boot image your systems.
> 4. Decide how to administer the cluster. I can recommend ansible.
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