[Discuss] Education - becoming a Cluster Administrator

[david3d at gmail.com (David Miller)]

> There are a few types of clusters.....
>
> 1) Where all the machines run the same code
> 2) where the job is divided across multiple machines
> 3) mix and match combinations of the above two
>

In any case there are some things that you should learn regardless of
the type of cluster when dealing with multiple *nix machines.  You'll
need to learn something like Puppet or Chef to manage configurations,
installed packages, and have these things backed up by revision
control to manage changes on the system.  You'll need to learn how to
deal with NIS or LDAP for centralizing users across the computers.
Although you can use Puppet/Chef to do that as well but NIS or LDAP is
a better solution.

As for how to go about doing this.  I would just set up a bunch of
virtual machines to learn the ropes of these things.
--
David