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Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters by Charles A. Bookman — book cover
Platform-Specific Programming, Linux, General Software Engineering

Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters

by Charles A. Bookman
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Overview

Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters provides Linux users with information about building their own Linux cluster from the ground up. It gives best practices, helpful hints, and guidelines about building one server or hundreds of servers at a level that administrators at any experience level can understand.

From installation of the air conditioning and power in the data center, to alternative file systems to the final production run, this book provides you with everything that you need to know. Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters walks you through the initial design and selection of the best possible types of clusters, as well as covering monitoring tools and providing for disaster recovery. Not only does this book provide information on parallel and Beowulf type clusters, Charles Bookman goes into depth on high availability clusters, load balancing, and provides advice for writing your own distributing applications as well. Incorporating best practices and cutting-edge approaches, Bookman provides step-by-step and tried-and-true methods of bringing up a Linux cluster to production level.

Synopsis

Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters provides Linux users with information about building their own Linux cluster from the ground up. It gives best practices, helpful hints, and guidelines about building one server or hundreds of servers at a level that administrators at any experience level can understand.

From installation of the air conditioning and power in the data center, to alternative file systems to the final production run, this book provides you with everything that you need to know. Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters walks you through the initial design and selection of the best possible types of clusters, as well as covering monitoring tools and providing for disaster recovery. Not only does this book provide information on parallel and Beowulf type clusters, Charles Bookman goes into depth on high availability clusters, load balancing, and provides advice for writing your own distributing applications as well. Incorporating best practices and cutting-edge approaches, Bookman provides step-by-step and tried-and-true methods of bringing up a Linux cluster to production level.

About the Author, Charles A. Bookman

About the AuthorAbout the Author Charles Bookman fell in love with the personal computer when he was 12. He would stay after school to teach himself programming on the Commodore Pet. His experiences with Linux started during the 2.0.30 days, when he took the work computer at his counseling job and converted it into something that nobody there had ever seen. After they fired him, he knew that he was on to something, and has been a Linux evangelist ever since. Charles' hobbies include being up to no good, using sarcasm, listening to music, being snobbish about art, playing bass and guitar, and painting and drawing when he finds the time. He'll kick your butt at table tennis, and is learning a great game of pool as well. Charles currently works at the University of the Pacific as a UNIX systems administrator, maintaining its high-performance cluster. He runs a design company, and consults in his spare time. © Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Want to build your own supercomputer? Or just protect your enterprise apps with maximum scalability and availability? Get out your trusty-dusty Linux distro and this book, and you’re in business.

Linux Clustering covers every phase of installing, configuring, and, above all, maintaining any type of Linux cluster. Author Charles Bookman, who runs high-performance Linux clusters for a living, doesn’t sugarcoat the complexities involved. For example, if you want to build a high-performance parallel cluster (maybe you have a hurricane to simulate), forget about Linux’s “set it and forget it” reputation: These beasts require constant tuning and tweaking.

You’ll begin by preparing your Linux cluster: designing topologies, preparing your environment, planning for security and backup, choosing distributions, selecting a filesystem (you’ll probably avoid the default ext2 filesystem); and automating installation with handy tools like SystemImager or Red Hat’s Kickstart.

Next, Bookman walks you step-by-step through constructing high-availability and fault-tolerant clusters; clusters for load balancing, distributed computing clusters (think SETI@home), and “Beowulf” parallel clusters. Along the way, he discusses clustering tools few Linux have encountered, from “heartbeat” applications that track every cluster member to tools for distributing jobs across multiple machines.

You’ll find chapters on managing your cluster and on troubleshooting. In each case, Bookman offers plenty of practical tips from firsthand experience. For example, he doesn’t merely tell you to have a plan for reinstalling damaged operating systems in an emergency; he provides a model script that can help you make sure all your key applications are available immediately after reinstall.

The only thing that’s wrong with this book is that you’ll leave wanting more. Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

Book Details

Published
June 1, 2002
Publisher
Sams
Pages
265
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9781578702749

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