There's been some talk here lately about Beowulf. But that's not the kind
of clustering I want to know about.
What I want to know is, what software is available to let me take several
machines, put TFTP servers on all of them, and make the whole thing respond
to one IP address.
What I want to do is take some thin clients and set them to boot from one IP
address, but have it round-robin to several different machines so that I'm
bound only by available network throughput, not by the vagaries of an
individual TFTP implementation.
The reason I want to do this is because the stinking AS/400 has a crappy
TFTP, and as a result you can only boot a theoretical maximum of 6 IBM
Network Stations from it at one time. Personal experience says that 6 is a
pipe dream, too; it craps out between 3 and 4 usually, and on a bad day more
like 2.
IBM admits their TFTP is to blame.
So I figure on taking 3 or 4 Linux boxes, clustering them, and being able to
boot a whole bunch at once.
But what software is there out to there to do this?
I know that if they could boot to a DNS address I could just round-robin
that, but unfortunately IBM's thin clients can only specify boot host by IP
address, and can only take 3 IPs, so the most I could do is 3 machines.
Since I want to have them go back to the AS/400 in the event the Linux boxen
are down (requirement, management won't even let me experiment with this if
we can't do that), I'm stuck with a total of 2 IPs I can specify. And that
won't balance the load, either; they'd all go to the first one, and only go
to the second if the first one didn't respond. It's possible for it to
respond but then be too overworked to complete the boot, since this is
checked at the beginning when they just want one file and later on they want
lots of fonts, so this isn't enough to make it work.
So I need to cluster them. This is the same kind of clustering you'd do for
a high-performance web server, in an application where round-robin DNS
didn't do the job.
I know it can be done, but can it be done at present with Linux?
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