Abacus - Cluster Live

Are you running this from Cluster Live network boot?
- If not, e.g. reading this documentation from the internet, please ignore this and proceed reading.
- If so, please test the cluster by clicking on Cluster Test.

What is Cluster Live?
Why?
Who can benefit from it?
How does it work?
What was it tested with?
How do I make my own Cluster Live CD?
Where to download Cluster Live?
About

What is Cluster Live?
- Boots a cluster of diskless Thin Clients.
- Automatically loads a Web browser.
- Share workload between Thin Clients.

Why?
- No individual installations required.
- Fast deployment of centralised software over multiple computers.
- No need to access the hard disk of your existing system.
- Portable yet scalable infrastructure.
- Less spending on high end computer hardware such as hard drives, processors and memory.

Who can benefit from it?
- Public kiosk
- Internet cafe
- Home, Office and other intranet premises
- Training centre
- Government sectors, and other organisations requiring large deployment of dedicated applications.
- Ideal for academics in developing countries to make use of computers cost effectively.
- Open Source developers can freely create their own Cluster Live CDs.

How does it work?
- A server gets booted by a Cluster Live CD.
- The client's BIOS is configured to boot through the LAN by default.
- When the server has finished the bootup sequence, the client can be booted through the LAN.

What was it tested with?
- IBM Thinkpad T30 (CPU: Pentium 4 - 1GHz; RAM: 512MB)
- Virtual Machines (Software to allow running of multiple O.S. simultaneously)
- IDE CDRW (To rewrite the ISO image on to the CD for testing)
- A hub with several LAN cables connecting the infrastructure.
- Source built with Red Hat Fedora Core 3 Linux

How do I make my own Cluster Live CDs?
- 1. Full install Fedora Core 3 flavour of the Red Hat Linux distribution on a sandbox test machine.
- 2. Copy /opt/abacus from the CD to the sandbox.
- 3. Modify and run /opt/abacus/thing/thingmakeclient.bash to create the thin client ramdisk image.
- 4. Modify and run /opt/abacus/thing/thingmakeserver.bash to create the live CD ISO image.

Where to download Cluster Live?
- You can download the ISO image with the source code from Sourceforge. There are many tools on the internet that manipulates with the ISO image, e.g. image it on to a CD, etc.
- To only download the source, please click here.
- Thinux 1.0 non-CD version can be found here.

About
- Created in 2005 January by Abacus I.T. Limited under the GNU/GPL open source licence.
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