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.)
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
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.
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
Well, just came back from a meeting of the local ACM chapter at my college and was elected vice president of the club! It seems that the current president of the club is graduating this semester, and they were missing a vice president before, so I jumped on the opportunity even though no one challenged it. So, I’ll be officially the vice president there next semester, which is pretty cool.
Besides that, we are also preparing for a pretty interesting programming competition at the local large university. Five hour competition on a Saturday, with not much of a chance of winning (seems that local large university also has the largest selection of CS students, so they always win). But hopefully we’ll be right under that university, beating out all the other small colleges in the area.
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
I’ve been doing some more studying and researching on cluster softwares and how to build different types of clusters for the new release of Clusterix. I had came across this site while doing some google searches which features just about every clustering software available. That site is definitely going to be a valuable resource for the next release.
Also, I checked in with paul_c about this mini_fo backport for the next release, but it seems that it will not be as easy as I had hoped. I might just have to use two different mini_fo’s or find a better translucency module for 2.4.x kernels. I’ll need to find something soon because once my cluster is built, I’ll be doing heavy development on Clusterix.
Besides that, bhartshorn has been working on a mod of Clusterix, which sounds really interesting. I’ll post more details about it once he has it up and ready to download.
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
Bah, I just can’t take it any longer. Where are my parts for my cluster? It’s only been a couple days with a day off for post office workers because of a holiday in the middle, but it still should be here! (Guess I’m kinda impatient )
Anyway, I’ve been looking into an interesting thing for my future career. I noticed a poster hanging on a bulletin board in the science building at my college. It mentioned about a fellowship program for high performance computing. Checked out their site and it’s quite interesting. I’m going to request some more info about it.
Besides that, nothing much else is happening besides the usual classes, tests, quizzes and such. Once my cluster is built, however, I’m going to need to do a lot of work for Clusterix.
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
These last few days have been quite quiet. I’ve been mostly waiting for parts to come in for my cluster, so I haven’t been able to do much with it. It’s still just steel plates, two hard drives and two cdroms just sitting on a plate while I wait for special IDE adapters to be shipped which will determine how I\’m going to mount them.
Besides this, I’ve been working on an interesting coding project for my parents business. They needed a way to enter what inventory they had into a program, and add up identical inventory items. Seems quite simple, but I took it a bit over the top 
Its now over 600 lines of C++ code and even though its just a console app, it’s pretty interactive. Going to look into maybe making a gui for it, but not sure. Besides it helping the business, it also helped me refresh my C++ knowledge which I really needed.
Also, Clusterix development has slowed to a stop. I have basically declared that I won’t use my old dev machines for Clusterix development anymore They were aggravating me since I couldn’t do much with them. So, once my cluster is built, Clusterix development will continue.
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
While watching Fox News Channel this morning, they showed a political cartoon about our US election that I just have to post it. I found it ridiculously funny and could\’t stop watching it on the creators website (http://www.jibjab.com). They actually created two of them, which was even better Here are the links:
http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/goodtobeindc_af
http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/content/this_land_af
Dang it, I just can’t stop watching them and haven’t gotten anything done
As for my cluster, got in the two laptop cdroms, and after pulling off the proprietary brackets, found they needed a special adapter to work with a normal IDE interface. I asked my friend at IFF if he had any, and sure enough he did. So I’ll purchase them with the order of my VIA EPIA 5000 fanless motherboards. Now I just need to figure out how to mount them to one of the 16 gauge steel plates.
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
Just had to post this after seeing it a couple of minutes ago. Take a look at this site:
http://www.robijn.net/lcdproc/lcdvc/
It is actually a client of the software from the last post for the LCD driver that makes your little textual LCD into a screen where you can login without a monitor or any fancy headless networking! Here’s a pic:
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
After doing some reading at http://www.mini-itx.com about some of mini-itx projects, I had stumbled across this open source Linux project. The project is called LCDproc. It basically takes a bunch of different LCD displays and displays info on what resources are being used in the computer and how much. This would be really quite interesting for my cluster because I can basically monitor its load balancing/distribution by just looking at the LCD. Going to have to look into one of those.
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
While searching for which mini-itx motherboards I should purchase for my cluster, I stumbled across this company called Industrial Flower Factory. After talking with one of the owners about one of the boards, we had come across as to why I’m purchasing the boards. I had mentioned that I will be using the boards to build my cluster for developing and testing Clusterix. Because of that, he offered me some great hardware for the cluster at no charge or discounted price. Thank you very much IFF!!! I and the Clusterix community truly appreciate your kindness
In other news, got my exams back from last week. All are A’s so I’m quite pleased, even for my over-achieving point of view.
Posted by g1powermac under Old Blog | Comments Off
