Setting up separate network question

[Kevin D. Clark]

Ben Scott writes:

>   I'm not following the above.  Where is the DHCP server for his
> cluster coming from?  

Somewhere on the corporate network, connected to via eth0.

> And what good does having private addresses on
> his node's eth1 interface do?

These help ensure that his cluster traffic remains on the dedicated
switch/hub that he has allocated exclusively for the cluster's network.

> And how do the cluster nodes reach the Internet?

Via eth0.  If they really have to...

>  Are you thinking of having his node get multiple
> Internet-facing addresses and doing proxy arp?

Nope.


All I am proposing is a quick and not-very-dirty solution that will
get the cluster up and running, all with a minimum of hassle from IT.

Let me put it this way:  my solution is quick and does not involve
setting up or configuring a DHCP server.  If somebody happens to
mention to IT that they are thinking about putting their own DHCP
server into the network, I am fairly confident that this will get IT's
attention....

>   For within the cluster: I find that DHCP is so much nicer than
> manually configuring everything, especially when things change (like
> they always do), or a computer fails and needs to be replaced.
> dnsmasq can easily provide name resolution tied into DHCP to eliminate
> the need for manually propigating host files (yuck!), and there are a
> few different ways to let DHCP assign static addresses if you want
> that.  Done properly, you can drop a new node into a network and have
> it auto-install and auto-configure itself with a handful of
> keystrokes.
> 
>   Granted, I've never worked on a compute cluster, but I don't know of
> any reason why these tools shouldn't work there, too, assuming
> commodity hardware (and it sounds like we are).

I don't deny that you could do all of this, but again, with the
exception of google, all of the clusters I am familiar with are
relatively static.

For the record, the clusters I have worked with have also purposefully
been hard-to-reach on the network, just to help isolate their
computrons from whatever gunk is on the regular network.

Kind regards,

--kevin
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