So I’ve started the BOINC farm I want. The first step is building the PXE server. I got a Core 2 Quad 9450 CPU with an ASUS mobo and 4G of RAM to be used as the PXE server. I need to configure this as a DHCP server and some other things at this time unknown. Part of the research I still need to do. I also just picked up two VIA 2500E mobo with a C7 processor built in and 2G of RAM each. These two systems will PXE boot to a minimal Ubuntu system and will just run the BOINC client.
The Core 2 Quad system went into an old case I had lying around. Actually my old Dual PIII 550 system that died a while back. I got a new 500W power supply for it but used an existing hard drive, DVD drive and floppy drive. The VIA mobos will be stacked together and will share another 500W power supply. I hope to have at least 4 VIA mobos sharing the one power supply eventually.
The server is running Ubuntu and still needs to have some critical components installed. The first thing I know I need is to configure it as my DHCP server. This means that the current DHCP service being provided by the router will need to be turned off. I think I need to configure a DNS server as well and then setup the PXE environment and OS that will get downloaded to the VIA systems. All stuff that I need to research. I need a TFTP server to download the OS files.
June 27, 2008
BOINC Farm
June 6, 2008
Ubuntu updated
So I took the plunge and updated Ubuntu to 8.04 (Hardy Heron). Everything seems to have gone alright except for the fact that it took longer to download and install than I thought and I ended up getting to bed waaay too late. The only real problem I had was with BOINC. The BOINC client and manager were updated as part of the update package and it didn’t work when I restarted. The BOINC client started without any problem but it did not appear to be running any tasks and when I started the manager it was unable to connect to the client. I tried reinstalling the BOINC client and manager but that did not help. I had to completely uninstall them first and reinstall to get things working again. The only problem with this was that when I rejoined the projects I am working on it created a new computer account for each project. When I then merged with the old account with the new it took the computer ID from the new one losing my computer ID number of 480 I had with Cosmology. Now I have a 5 digit computer ID. You have to get in early to get the low numbered computer IDs so I’ve lost some status there, oh well.