Allways liked the idea about clustered machines.
Bought some Via Mini-Itx cards...why ? The answer is simple, atleast to me it
is. The price is ok (the most expensive part yet is the Cisco 2950, but the
plan is to replace it with 2 smaller switches:), nice power consumption, perfect
size (17x17cm), and no fan's to create noise.
The idea was to build something like this,
and a 'reallife' picture of the server now looks like this
:) Have to build a better box for it later, but this will do for now.
Basically there is a 'root' server which holds all the root systems and data,
where each 'node' server boots via PXE, loads the kernel, mounts the root partition
for that specific node and then in the end starts the services needed.
The nodes again are loadbalanced 2 and 2 with Linux-ha,
lvs......its all in the Ultramonkey
package, more servers can be added, but hey..this is my home server and the
load ain't that high......yet :)
Right now its only the webserver, Postfix
mailserver, mysql and some monitoring that is running on the nodes.
More pictures can be found here.
Some mrtg stats can be found here.
Anyway, this seems to be the most time consuming computer related home project
I've started until now, and I'm still not there yet :)
New build.
Again...........
Kept the root server, and made a new kernel, and patched it with the openmosix patch.
Got 3 nodes for load sharing now, but I still have a problem finding out what to run on top of it :) (a luxury problem ??:-)
What it looks like can bee seen in the Gallery
Anyway, the pxe/nfs-root server is great for all this testing, and testing out all this new images. Copy the root of one server, add its ip to the dhcp scope, voila .. another new box is up running.