[1082] in athena10
Re: DebAthena Locker System
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Geoffrey Thomas)
Sun Feb 8 12:41:46 2009
Date: Sun, 8 Feb 2009 12:40:47 -0500 (EST)
From: Geoffrey Thomas <geofft@MIT.EDU>
To: adnaan jiwaji <adnaan@MIT.EDU>
cc: debathena@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <177df0fc0902070928u623bd773h872094a2d68bf45f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.2.00.0902081229530.22667@quickstation-next-house.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Athena lockers are for storing files (including software), not
actually running the software. If you're only short on disk space and want
to offer a lot of software on a lot of machines, then the locker system is
useful; this was Athena's original use case back in the 1980s. If you're
short on CPU power in addition to disk space, then you may want to look at
something like LTSP for running software on a powerful remote server.
Also, if you just want file storage, it may be less configuration overhead
to simply set up a regular NFS server (for which the Ubuntu community
documentation has excellent instructions) and have it be mounted on the
client machines. Lockers are just pointers to directories in a (usually)
networked file system like AFS or NFS.
Thos out of the way, the one-minute overview of what to do to answer your
original question is:
- Set up an AFS cell, possibly including a Kerberos realm. This isn't
overly complicated, but it's more than I can describe how to do in an
e-mail. I've seen many good walkthroughs on the web. You could also do
this off Athena's or SIPB's AFS cell, but performance from Rwanda would be
painful.
- Set up a Hesiod realm, which is basically a DNS server configured to
return records like (for the athena.mit.edu realm):
geofft.filsys.ns.athena.mit.edu. IN TXT "AFS /afs/athena.mit.edu/user/g/e/geofft w /mit/geofft"
i.e., a request for the locker ("filsys") named "geofft" returns a TXT
record pointing to the full AFS path of that locker.
- Edit our debathena-hesiod-config package to point to your Hesiod realm
instead of athena.mit.edu, probably edit the debathena-pyhesiodfs package
to use something other than "/mit", and deploy the patched version of that
package along with the rest of debathena-standard.
When we're not looking at an impending release this week of Debathena to
the clusters across campus, we'll see if we can document how to replicate
a minimal Debathena/Athena environment elsewhere; this is a request we've
received more than once.
Hope this helps,
--
Geoffrey Thomas
Debathena project
debathena@mit.edu
On Sat, 7 Feb 2009, adnaan jiwaji wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are setting up a computer lab at a school in Rwanda. We have Ubuntu
> machines which have minimal resources. We would like to implement the Athena
> locker system on these machines to run more demanding applications.
>
> How do we go about doing this? What packages do we need to install the
> locker system? What dependent features do we need?
>
> Thanks,
> Adnaan
