ClusterKnoppix

chronicon writes "Knoppix is the ultimate live CD. No geek-kit should be without it. Now Wim Vandersmissen has taken it a step futher by adding openMosix functionality. Drop the clusterKnoppix CD in your "server", boot up... boot up some networked clients... Knoppix built in LTSP magic kicks in and ta-da--instant cluster!"

really needs to be said

[b17bmbr]

this is truly remarkable and only could be done in an open source envronment. it is projects liek this that clearly show that it is only a matter of time before we look back and go "micro who?". forget the billions in the bank, the fud, the monopoly, etc., could they really do something like this? and when the cat is finally, really out of the bag, about the quality of F/OSS, it will be amazing.

Hmmm....

[SharpFang]

Start a cluster of these with some profitable computations at work in the evening, using every worker's own PC, then come in first in the morning to remove all evidences quickly and painlessly... (or even watch over that all during your graveyard shift as a sysadmin)... Instant cluster - that's clever.

I really want to understand...

[JesterOne]

Everyone is talking about how cool this is and how well it runs but what would I use this for in the real world (even the 'fake' world). So, I have a network by day, cluster by night. What am I going to run on it? I mean folding proteins in realtime may be cool to some but, come on... I really would like to understand (I'm an MCSE running all MSFT except one server - finance server is running RedHat). Someone explain this to me (linux avocates - this is your chance)...

Re:clusterKnoppix Mirrors

[gladbach]

this site used to host bittorrents for slashdot stuff, but haven't seen anything there in a while... used to have 6 or so downloads from recent /. stuff.

http://207.44.142.96/

Clusters are a bit overhyped

[semanticgap]

I've heard many people refer to clusters as a way to turn many small coomputers into one large one, but it doesn't work this way. There is nothing magical about a cluster, and it's not exactly like clustering gives you instant supercomputers because (sort of like with SMP) you need your software to be cluster-aware. Clusters aren't really useful in anything other than some very specialized applications where computing-intensive calculations can be broken down into small tasks. Perhaps intensive graphics as in movie post-production or scientific calculations, but not your general IT stuff.

Knoppix is impressive

[FreeUser]

Knoppix is very impressive. As a former Debian (now Gentoo) user and administrator, I can appreciate the quality of the "back-end" engineering in distributions like Debian, which is IMHO hands down the best binary distribution out there (Gentoo is a source based distro, as is Linux from Scratch and Source Mage. It is my preference for source based distros, and portage in particular with Gentoo, that led me to switch, not any argument with the quality of Debian or apt-get, which is excellent). To see such a slick, astonishingly easy live-cd environment put on top of such a quality distribution is delightful, and while I yearn for a Gentoo knoppix (and will likely get my wish with their ever-improving but as yet no-where-near-as-good-as knoppix live-CDs), I have on more than one occasion used a knoppix CD to rescue a non-debian (Gentoo, Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, you-name-it) distribution.

Having such easy clustering, with such an idiot-proof interface ("put the CD in the drive, boot, and you're ready to go"), built upon such a solid foundation where shortcuts that afflict other distributions haven't been taken, is truly an achievement worthy of praise and respect.

In short, knoppix already rocked, and now they have surpassed themselves again! Very, very cool!

Re:Hehe Neat

[gladbach]

since when does vidomi work on linux? I know it was talked about, but havent seen anything come to fruition yet...

Re:Imagine a

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Why do I get the feeling that Knoppix is going to save the world someday?

Every day I find another use for Knoppix. I've re-built my own - with non re-distributable software, like X-Over plugins.

bzzzzt... sorry.

[Ayanami Rei]

So, when an incoming connection comes into the head-end, and then the incoming socket data is routed over the network to the remote machine running the accepting thread instance, and the reply is shuttled back over to the head-end, and then forwarded to the internet... how is that any better than having Apache running on each server individually behind a load-balancer?

It would be nice to run a database or app. server in the mosix cluster with a web front-end. Apache itself will not scale over the cluster.