junkert's blog

Just thought I would let everyone know that we have a public Ubuntu mirror on the Montana State University campus Bozeman. Feel free to use it as much as you would like. The mirror server is connected directly to our backbone network with gigabit speeds. Anyone on campus and at our regional campuses (Billings, Great Falls, etc) should benefit from very fast updates as well. Anyways here is the information:

Ubuntu
rsync://mirror.msu.montana.edu/ubuntu
ftp://mirror.msu.montana.edu/ubuntu
http://mirror.msu.montana.edu/ubuntu

Ubuntu-Releases

Introduction

About a year ago a large shipment of servers arrived at MSU for the use in a new grid and cluster system for students and faculty of the Montana State University Computer Science department. Once the servers were opened from their boxes we realized that installing the operating system of our choice was going to be complicated considering the units were "engineering samples" and were never used in production. Also each unit was a 1U form factor with no external media device (CDR/DVD/etc). On the newer PIV-Xeon systems (referred to as Server Type 1) the install was not as complicated as originally anticipated. On the other hand the installation of Gentoo on the older Dual-PIII systems (referred to as Server Type 2) was more complicated due to the alpha version of the BIOS installed on the systems.

The tutorial you are currently reading has been broken into 6 different parts to help with captivating the reader at the same time as describing short-cut techniques that were learned along the way (ha ha, captivating). By the end of this tutorial one should grasp the basic concept of how to build a cluster and some simple tricks to make maintaining a cluster easier in the life of a cluster administrator.