Setting up separate network question

Kevin D. Clark kevin_d_clark at comcast.net
Mon Mar 17 13:33:59 EDT 2008


Labitt, Bruce writes:

> I've got to set up a secondary network on my Centos computer.  I need to
> be able to contact the internet from my secondary network computers.
> However, I really don't want the outside network to get into my
> secondary network.  I have a high speed network connecting a cluster of
> computers.  The external network is much slower than the secondary
> network.  

I think that the easiest way to setup a cluster in the manner that you
describe would be to ignore ipmasq, let the nodes in your cluster get
their eth0 IP addresses via DHCP, and just statically assign some
private IP addresses to your node's eth1 addresses.  From here, it
will be trivial to just maintain a static /etc/hosts file, which you
can easily propagate to all of the nodes in your cluster.  This is a
cluster: I assume that there is not going to be a lot of churn in the
number of nodes in this cluster.

I would also strongly suggest that you come up with a straightforward
way of naming your hosts in your /etc/hosts file -- something like:

192.168.1.1     cluster1
192.168.1.2     cluster2
192.168.1.3     cluster3
192.168.1.4     cluster4
...

Among other things, this makes it a lot easier to write Expect scripts
to manage all of the nodes in the cluster (I speak from experience
here...)

Depending on how important your cluster computations are, you might
want to consider disconnecting the outside network during computation.

The only other thing to ensure is that as the nodes in the cluster
communicate, that they do so via the high-speed, internal network.
Unplugging the connection to the regular network will help you verify
this.  Depending on your setup, you might have to add a route for
eth1.

Kind regards,

--kevin
-- 
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