D2OL and linux guide!

[chipmonk010]

alright so i recently switched a couple rigs over to linux for various reasons and in the process have come up with some nice info about running D2OL in linux that i thought i would share. i know someone was asking about this awhile back, anyway maybe its will even convince some of u to convert lol. anywho here goes...

1. loading the GUI version on a linux system (pretty basic)
go here: http://www.d2ol.com/dOL/download_instructions.html
download the GUI installer with Java
*in this example the installer was downloaded to /usr/src/
once downloaded just enter this into terminal window
cd /usr/src (wherever u downloaded the file to)
chmod 755 installDDOL.bin
./installDDOL.bin
the setup proggy will start and just follow the instructions to install

2.load the non-GUI version
download the non-GUI version of the client with java from the link above
its a tar.gz file, when i downloaded it, i just opened it directly from the internet with a filemanager
and un-tared it to /usr/src but you can also save the tar.gz file to ur hard drive and un-tar from the
terminal with this comand:
tar zxvf /usr/src/guilessInstallDDOL.tar.gz
once un-tared u have a folder called SengentD2OL (in my case /usr/src/SengentD2OL)
now make a directory called /D2OL and copy the contents of SengentD2OL into the new directory
your should have two folders in your /D2OL folder /D2ol/D2OL and /D2OL/jre
now go into D2OL/res and open the general.prp file chage the field "LaunchMain" to false
at this point if you are reinstalling d2ol copy your node.prp file into /D2OL/D2OL/res folder
now for the moment of truth!!
pop open a terminal window and type the following:
cd /D2OL/D2OL
./D2OL controller:cli
(u must type the above exactly to run in text mode)
if all is well it should start up no problem. this should run fine on almost any major distro, but if u get error post here and ill try to help.
running in text mode has many advantages besides taking up less resources, you can also run it on a system that doesnt have a Desktop Manager.



much more to come! running as a service more complicated stuff i just wanted to get this up for now. will add more soon!

[Plum Ugly]

chipmonk010 is there any gain in runing Linux over MS on D2OL?

[chipmonk010]

to tell you the truth i didnt notice much difference, but with linux your can easily set up a terminal server and boot nodes diskless. this was the main motivation to migrating some machines to linux. you can also get away with less ram since the linux footprint is so small, and it may speed things up slightly since linux is much less bloated and takes up less resources. so between running in windows and running in linux text mode i would think there would be an increase in output but i have not tested this so im not sure...

[Rodzilla]

Let us know if this helps!

Keep the pointers coming... If it looks good I'll switch all of my dedicated crunchers over to Linux...

[lv_dicedealer]

Did I follow that guide, you can run d2ol diskless ????
If so , I wanna know how to do that. Would everything then be stored in physical memory? Could you setup a vitual ramdrive with enough physical memory and run without a drive of any sort?

[edit]
Guess I did read it wrong, too much soma.
Anyway, would be cool to boot off of network card and then do all the batch/setup diskless and use a virtual ramdrive to store all the stuff!!
[/edit]

[chipmonk010]

Did I follow that guide, you can run d2ol diskless ????
If so , I wanna know how to do that. Would everything then be stored in physical memory? Could you setup a vitual ramdrive with enough physical memory and run without a drive of any sort?

[edit]
Guess I did read it wrong, too much soma.
Anyway, would be cool to boot off of network card and then do all the batch/setup diskless and use a virtual ramdrive to store all the stuff!!
[/edit]

by following what i wrote up there u wont be able to boot disklessly that is much more complex, but the reason i migrated to linux was to be able to boot disklessly. in order to do this u need a linux server, and you dont even need a ram drive, you can mount a folder remotely on another comp as your hard drive so if theres a power outage u dont loose any cands i just recently set this up n its
pretty cool for more info check out the my thread at free-dc.org, PCZ over there was nice enough to walk me through setting it up. http://www.free-dc.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=6
when its fully setup, add new nodes is quite easy and your only need a mb with built in NIC, cpu and ram. so its cheap cheap cheap!

[Rodzilla]

How do you boot into Linux on the slave nodes? From a CD?

[smokey]

You should use PXE to boot over the network, then NTP to mount your / to a ramdrive. After that, it's all gravy.

[Rodzilla]

You should use PXE to boot over the network, then NTP to mount your / to a ramdrive. After that, it's all gravy.

Is it all automated... or do you have to go through a bunch of BS every time you need to reboot or power down?

[smokey]

Define 'a bunch of bs'.

[Rodzilla]

ok.. I turn on my XP rig... it boots... goes into windows... and D2OL starts...

All I have to do is press the power button...

Diskless Linux setup??

[chipmonk010]

you dont need a cd, i do it through pxe check the link i posted for more info ^ all your need is a mb with nic, cpu and ram, nothing else not even video once its setup. just hit the power button and it boots up n starts d2ol that being said it took me awhile to get setup right. i have it setup so u can telnet each client (log on to the client over the network) and check to make sure everythings working. very cool stuff

[smokey]

telnet ! Even if it is just a small LAN, ssh, ssh, ssh. It's faster, smarter and stronger, so to speak.

@Rodzilla: There really isn't much to it. You can achieve the same effect through Windows, though the optimizations for a 'dumb' client are not there... PXE booting is simple and there seem to be at least two of us around that would be willing to help you (and anyone else along).

[STEvil]

would be nice to be able to boot off a cd or something, saves on hard drives

[smokey]

Why do you need a hard drive? See: http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html

[shadowing]

Nice work!! Time for me to actually get it working on linux. Wait... does this apply to all distros??

[STEvil]

smokey - thats what I was saying.. it would be nice because then we wouldnt need HDD's.

[chipmonk010]

Nice work!! Time for me to actually get it working on linux. Wait... does this apply to all distros??

i pretty sure this applies to all linux distros, BSD might be different but i havent tried bsd so i dono, what distro do u have?
ive loaded d2ol on fedora and slackware with no problems using the steps above

[smokey]

PXE is distro-agnostic. In fact, it is even OS-agnostic, to a certain extent. Remote booting can be configured on Windows/UNIX/Mac/Linux machines. All of these operating systems support thin clients, and can be configured as such. The great advantage of using BSD/Linux for this is that the GUI and all of the unnecessary bloat is optional. Really, the only thing that needs to be running is a network interface, a terminal daemon (ssh or telnet) and the kernel/system loggers. Pretty much everything else commonly found on a system is just gravy in this situation.

[chipmonk010]

i think shadowing was asking about the guide to loading d2ol, but i agree 100% ^ i use ltsp 3.0 and clients boot in text mode and automatically start d2ol as a service and using nohup i apend the progress output to a text file it works quite nicely, i set it up with the help of PCX over at free-dc (i already posted the link) its very minimalist which i like, im also looking into openMosix which is a clustering software, which if i can set it up basically makes a lan into one big supercomputer so you could have 11 nodes and one server u start 12 instances of d2ol on the server and it automatically spreads the load over the networkl so each comp does one instance, this can be done with a bootable cd or pxe boot, it looks pretty cool. smokey u ever try this? know anything about it?

[smokey]

LOL. That's my job. I'm a sysadmin for a small compute cluster. The cluster is running Solaris, since it has the best performance on a small cluster environment. Other Unixes and Linux are fine for it too, but they don't begin to pull ahead on the performance until the amount of cpus goes over 1000, or so.

[EDIT] Just some linkage for you: MPI. [/EDIT]

[shadowing]

I'm using Knoppix. I can't find any other distro's I like.

[chipmonk010]

1000 cpus thanks for the linkage ill check it out.

shadowing if ur looking for a good beginner distro, try ubuntu its very newbie friendly but also stable and robust, only thing i dont like about it is it come with gnome and no support for kde. i use slackware myself, i just finished a couple days of distro testing and im reloading slackware 10.0 as we speak great stable distro, lil tough for beginners tho. xandros is supposed to also be a good newbie distro, i dono much about it tho and have never tried it....

[Rodzilla]

1000 cpus thanks for the linkage ill check it out.

shadowing if ur looking for a good beginner distro, try ubuntu its very newbie friendly but also stable and robust, only thing i dont like about it is it come with gnome and no support for kde. i use slackware myself, i just finished a couple days of distro testing and im reloading slackware 10.0 as we speak great stable distro, lil tough for beginners tho. xandros is supposed to also be a good newbie distro, i dono much about it tho and have never tried it....

Thanks for the noob info! now maybe I can give linux a go!

[smokey]

If I were you Rodzilla, I would just 'suck-it-up' and install Slack. We can help you solve any problems you have along the way. I feel like it's best for you, in the long run, to just sit down and start learning Linux. Stop searching for an 'easy' way out. Remember, we're here to hold your hand, if you need it, too.