[Boulder-Denver Ruby Group] Ara's lightning talk at RubyConf

[ara.t.howard at noaa.gov]

On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Kevin Williams wrote:

> Hello Ara,

hi kevin-

> I saw your lightning talk at RubyConf; nice job!  Did you build your
> distributed environment on DRb or Rinda?

believe it or not, neither!  it's 100% nfs based.  although that may seem like
an odd choice it buys a bunch of features

   - no (new) ports need opened.  nfs is about the only thing that can get
     through our firewalls so this makes us able to install and configure
     clusters with zero admin intervention.

   - nfs has the nice property that it hangs (on the client) when the server
     goes down rather than dropping the connection.  just last week we rebooted
     our central server and it took about 1.5 days to come back up (fsck on
     giant disks) and all the jobs on 30 nodes simply froze until it was fully
     functional again.

   - typically one needs a central code location that's shared anyhow: we
     install all code and configuration on this central nfs server so and
     upgrade of ruby, for instance, is instantly available on all nodes. our
     nodes have nothing but a user account and a crontab, which lets us bring
     them online from scratch in literally minutes: there is no software
     installed locally.

   - the nfs model is more easily understood by less technical operators since
     it's operation is an abstraction of the filesystem and that is well
     understood by any operator

you can read more about it, (slightly) out-dated, here

   http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7922

fyi - i'm just about to release a new version.  if you are planning on playing
with rq let me know and i'll send you a pre-release.

cheers.

-a
-- 
my religion is very simple.  my religion is kindness. -- the dalai lama