After spending pretty much the entire day yesterday working on my cluster, I finally got somewhere with it. It’s almost ready to test even though it still needs three pieces of plexiglas and hard drives that actually work (ones shown are dead drives just so I didn’t kill the new ones that will be going in it). But, before I test the motherboard with a livecd, I still need to get some good ram and an ac to dc converter. It will probably be next week before I’ll be able to test them. Anyway, here’s some more pics:
In the first picture, you can see the front of the cluster with the cdroms and the motherboards. Also, one mobo does have its faceplate on just to show you what it will look like. The second pic is the right side of the cluster. The top mobo has the firewire card now. Also, those cables you see will be run through the back of the cluster then through the side as it is now. I will route out some grooves in the middle plate for the cables to go. The next pic is of the back of the cluster. As you can tell I have gotten one piece of plexiglas on it and it turned out pretty nice. The last pic is the left side of the cluster. You can really see the DC to DC converters with their atx cables pretty well.
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Well, after reading Verm’s blog, I just had to take this here file extension quiz. It basically asks you a bunch of questions and then tells you what file extension you are. I’m a .jpg:
Interesting, it’s quite accurate, except maybe for the truth distortion thingie (could be because I couldn’t really answer some questions 
)
Now, after taking that quiz, I then took the “Which OS are you?” one:
Now that’s more like it 
Besides taking these little quizzes, this week has been kinda nasty. With a true exam, quiz/test, and a CS project, all in a two day period, it has been quite hectic. Luckily I don’t have classes on Fridays so I can rest a bit from the stress (that Discrete Math exam wasn’t pretty). So hopefully I’ll be doing some work on the cluster and on Clusterix soon.
(EDIT)
Ok I just needed to take another one of those quizzes. Which Nigerian spammer are You?
Hehehe, gotta love them Nigerian spammers
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Wow, gotta say I really like this here new template for my blog. It seems bBlog is really, really nice for switching between themes and such. It has some really good features that I really like. (Did I say really? ) I still will be doing some more modding to it, but I don’t think it will be major. Anyway, if you have any suggestions, just post a comment (still moderated, just in case).
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It seems I have alot of work for college due this week and not much has been done with either the cluster or Clusterix development. I did compile another kernel for Clusterix and cut up some pieces of plexiglas for the cluster’s outside. More pics of the cluster will be coming soon, probably later in the week.
Also, mini_fo seems to be fairly stable, although it sill doesn’t allow .deb installs via apt-get yet. I’ll need to talk with Olivier some more about that.
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Here’s some more pics of the cluster. Sorry I didn’t get them up yesterday but still got them nonetheless. Also, the pics aren’t the best, but they should suffice.
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After quite a bit of testing and tweaking with help from both Olivier and paul_c, I can finally announce that the efforts to get the 2.6.x kernel version of mini_fo to work with 2.4.x kernels has been successful! For the first time today, I was actually able to successfully boot a Clusterix livecd using mini_fo instead of translucency. This is awesome as mini_fo is soooo much better than trans as an overlay filesystem. Testing is still being done with it (seems installing .debs via apt-get still doesn’t work yet), but it seems promising. Also, I’m seeing alot of changes between Morphix pre1 base (original base for Clusterix) and pre3. I’m seeing some issues with it, but hope that it won’t cause any major problems.
Besides that, I now have the laptop cdrom drives mounted to my cluster. At first I thought it was going to be fairly simple to mount them (once I figured on a plan to mount them) but it wasn’t so simple. What I did was run two pieces of aluminum over the bottom of the drives to sandwich them to the bottom of the top plate (will have pics tomorrow). However, if you apply too much pressure, the drive never opens. After some tweaking, I think I have the drives opening pretty well.
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Finally got do some work on my cluster today. I went to the local hardware store to pick up some threaded rods, rubber washers, nylon spacers, machine screws, and nuts. I then began working on drilling 5/16″ holes approximately a half an inch from the corners in the three 16 gauge steel plates for the threaded rods. After messing around with the drill for quite a while, I finally got it done and put it all together. That part of the case actually came out quite awesome. I then decided to work on mounting the motherboards and dc to dc converters but found out the machine screws I purchased were just a tad too wide. Oh well, I’ll mount it all later then. Anyway, I have a pic of it below and a link to more pics:
Here’s some more
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Well, after much wait, I got in some main parts for my cluster, and it is really starting to look cool as I now can see how the motherboards and dc to dc converters fit on the 16 gauge plates. I’ll hopefully be doing some work on the cluster tomorrow and will post some pictures of it then.
Besides that, there seems to be some good progress on the backport of mini_fo. With help from Olivier and paul_c, it has been slowly coaxed to compile. Although it still isn’t fully compiling, there has been some good progress on it, which is great. I’ll post some more info on it as we continue to test and fix it.
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Even though I really needed to do work for college stuff today, I decided to work on the new base for Clusterix anyway. My first challenge was to test out the older mini_fo with a 2.4.27 kernel to see if it segfaulted like what paul_c has experienced with it. After setting up the kernel in the base, I then copied the base files over to my PowerBook to create the iso and test it on Virtual PC (this is another reason for building my cluster). And like what paul_c experienced, it segfaulted as well. I was kinda disappointed at this because I thought there was some hope because paul_c had used some patches I didn’t use. As paul_c and I began doing some troubleshooting of the segfaults, I heard back from Olivier (the original creator of the 2.6.x kernel mini_fo version) that he made a backport of mini_fo for me to test! This was wonderful, except I think he forgot to attach it to the email. So I’m waiting to hear back from him again.
Besides that, I wanted to see if I could get the base to boot under translucency just to make sure nothing was completely borked by moving to Morphix pre3 base release. I first added the extra boot option to enable trans, but it didn’t work. Finally figured out that it was being cut off because I had to many boot options already.
Once I straightened that out, I got the iso to boot which was great, but I kept getting these odd modprobe warnings saying that modules.conf was newer than modules.dep. After much aggravation trying to figure why these warnings were being displayed, I eventually devised a hack for it. It seems that during the boot, modules.conf was modified/generated making the timestamp of it newer than modules.dep. Not sure how Morphix didn’t get the warnings, but I needed to add a touch command to knoppix-autoconfig so it would make sure modules.conf would be older than modules.dep. Oh well, another hack to the growing list. (Also, alsa is now installed because I had thought it might have been the problem.)
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Bah, gcc is driving me crazy! I decided to actually do some Clusterix development today even though I don’t have my cluster setup yet. My plans were to try out the older mini_fo for 2.4.xx kernels to see how well it works with a 2.4.27 kernel. First, while trying to compile mini_fo, it just couldn’t find certain files for the compile. The problem was with the way I compiled and installed the kernel (all traditionally). It wanted the kernel to be compiled and installed the Debian way to work. So, after waiting 5 hours to recompile the kernel (this is one reason why I’m building my cluster), I tried the mini_fo compile again. This time it was erroring out for another reason I couldn’t figure out, but once I tried gcc-2.95 on it, it actually compiled! Now I need to recompile the kernel again so both the kernel and module compilers match. Another 5 hours. . .
Besides that, I have been looking at some other cluster softwares and some of them are really quite interesting. Definite additions for the next Clusterix will be PVM and MPICH because they are .debs which makes really simple install. Also, I might add this as well because its an interesting complement to openMosix.
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