Dear Sergei, IMO, the easiest way to achieve your goals is good old NIS and NFS with a centralized server on wired gigabit network. You could go with LDAP instead of NIS, but it is considerably more difficult to set up. One computer would act as a server, containing the user database, homes and programs. Hardware RAID is not worth it. You are better off getting a Linux-supported SAS/SATA HBA (e.g. Dell SAS 6/iR) and making a software RAID 5 with mdadm out of a bunch of inexpensive consumer-grade SATA disks. You need a minimum of 4 drives for RAID5. An external HDD enclosure might be necessary depending on server's chassis and the desired number of drives. We built our server from an old P4 workstation with a couple gigs of RAM (8 clients). Having two or more cores is a benefit. If I am not mistaken, software RAID 5 is not bootable, so you would need an extra drive (can be very small) for the core part of the OS. Export /home and /usr/local with NFS, mount them from client machines, hook the clients up to NIS and you are done. Some programs might not reside in /usr/local in which case you would have to export and mount more directories. Ubuntu community has pretty good and easy to follow guides for NIS, NFS and mdadm.
Bets regards,
Dmitry
On 2013-07-29, at 6:22 AM, Sergei Strelkov wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> In old times I, just like about any protein crystallographer,
> used to work on a cluster of SGI/IRIX workstations with complete NFS-based
> cross-mounting of hard disks.
>
> A typical operation included:
> 1. A single home directory location for every user:
> if my home directory was on workstation X, I would by default use
> it after logging on any of the workstations in the cluster.
> 2. A single location for all software for general use.
> (And, obviously, 3. The ability to log on any node from
> any terminal; today this is done via the 'ssh -X' command).
>
> I wondered if someone could give us an advice on a painless
> setup enabling 1. and 2., for a small cluster of Ubuntu computers.
> We (will) have about five similar Dell computers in a local (192.168.*.*)
> network (wired/wireless). Any tips on the hardware (especially the
> LAN and network disks) are also welcome.
>
> Many thanks,
> Sergei
>
> --
> Prof. Sergei V. Strelkov
> Laboratory for Biocrystallography
> Dept of Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences, KU Leuven
> Herestraat 49 bus 822, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
> Work phone: +32 16 330845 Mobile: +32 486 294132
> Lab pages: http://pharm.kuleuven.be/anafar
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