[SAC] New Blades - Initialization and tasking

[Frank Warmerdam]

Benjamin Thelen wrote:
> Hello Frank,
> 
> 
> Frank Warmerdam schrieb:
>> Folks,
>>
>> John has a bunch of shiny new blades setup now that kickstart is working
>> again.  /me ^5's John!
>>
> 
> What is kickstart? I found this on wikipedia
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstart. You'll directly see that
> telascience seems to use Amiga ;-))!?
> 
> Well, it must have something to do with bootstrapping?

Benjamin,

The kickstart problems seem to have been fixed.  I don't know any details
about it though.

> You suggest to install "FOSS GIS Book Wiki" on .219. I'd like to 
> "resuggest" - you didn't have a real chance to read my last mail, yet - 
> to use one machine, e.g .217 for all the wikis. Or are the blades to 
> powerful, that it would be wasted power to use just one blade for some 
> simple wikis? Don't know.

I hadn't expected that we would use a whole blade exclusively for just
wikis.  We basically have five blades, and so I'm hopeful we can run
serveral "medium security" services like wiki, svn, etc off one server.

> I assume that "FOSS GIS Book Wiki" is the same as "freegis book wiki", 
> which was asked by edu at osgeo.org to setup?

Sorry ... my mixup.  I mean the freegis book wiki.

> I wonder, how the backup works for all these blades. Is there already a 
> solution?

I don't believe there is.  I am thinking we could use a two part
strategy.  One is to have a frequent backup of some services to another
blade, or to the big NFS drive on "bucket".   But I also think we ought
to identify key services and data to backup off-site.   I wonder if
"rsync" would be useful for network backup or if someone has a better
idea?

> Is it possible to install a FreeBSD on one blade? That really would be 
> cool. I'd like to setup WMS services, mapserver, GeoServer on it.

I'm not sure how easy this would be.  Would FreeBSD be better because
of better "jail" support"?  Generally speaking, I would prefer to keep to
one platform as much as possible so it is easier to move stuff around.

 > What about something like jails, used in FreeBSD, XEN or something like
 > that, to segregate things? I don't know, if there is something else
 > besides XEN similar like jails in Linux.

I have little experience with virtualization solutions like XEN or
jails, so I'm open to some advice.  It *seems* like XEN might quickly
use up memory and disk space to operate several virtual machines at
once.  My understanding of jails was that they were primarily useful
to prevent users from being able to impact each other by having almost
distinct directory trees for the jails.   How does this work in practice?

 > Could you find a possibility to use LDAP together with mediawiki? I
 > could't at first sight.

I haven't had a look yet, so I have no suggestions.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org