Customer Reviews

Linux Clustering: Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book is divided into eleven chapters, unevenly distributed among three sections: an overview of clustering for Linux, building clusters, and maintaining clusters. Four appendices provide brief information about online clustering resources, options for RedHat's "Kickstart," options for DHCP, and information on "Condor ClassAd Machine Attributes."

Bookman provides a central piece of wisdom that no system administrator should ignore: redundancy. In the case of high availability clusters, parts redundancy is the name of the game, but one should not forget the human component; no administrator should be caught with only a cell phone-keep a pager just in case. However, in a post-modern turn that might seem brilliant if it were applied in a work of fiction rather than a technical book, the author seems to apply the concept of redundancy to the text itself.

That the book began not as a book but rather as a collection of talks or presentations, or some other smaller format, is evidenced by the repetition of information between chapters and sections. Such nearly poetic repetitions also occur within sentences and paragraphs (e.g. "nightly backups each night" on page 25).

An editor never looked at Linux Clustering; the book had two "technical reviewers" but their contributions didn't include fixing mangled syntax and strained "style." On page 14 in the second paragraph a large segment of a sentence from the previous page is pasted into another sentence, resulting in a nonsensical block of text. The number of hyphenation, syntax, word choice, and subject-verb agreement errors is atrocious and makes the book difficult to read.

Some of the misinformation in the text appears to be unintentional (but ignorance is no excuse for a UNIX systems administrator); some is due to the fact that the author deals only with old (2.2) kernels, old versions of journeling filesystems, and old distributions; and yet other misinformation is the result of misplaced attempts at humor (such as stating that GNU stands for the Gateway Naming Utility; one can only hope that this was intended to be funny). Other jokes often misfire, but do point to the intended audience (consider, for example, the section heading "Space: The Final Frontier").

In the Introduction the author indicates that the book should be read by "Linux enthusiasts and users who want to get a Linux cluster up and running with the least amount of fuss." The organization of the book will not, however, aid this enterprise, for there is little "how to" information provided, but rather a great deal of background information on compiling kernels, various types of journeling file systems, and RedHat's Kickstart (perhaps inappropriate considering that the book specifically states that basic information will not be covered). Another section or two deal with basic networking and security. Various types of clusters are discussed, as are a few of the types of clustering software (e.g. Condor and Mosix) available.

The book, however, is clearly intended for administrators of clustering systems; a special emphasis is high availability and load balancing clusters. Parallel computing and the types of applications end users would wish to run receive far too little discussion.

Almost all technical books regurgitate the contents of freely available FAQs and HOWTOs to some degree, yet the good ones summarize the relevant points, make dry documentation more accessible, and give the reader some new insights. Because Bookman's Linux Clustering suffers from heinous spelling, grammar, and style errors; deals primarily with outdated software; contributes little new to the discussion; and doesn't speak to non-admins, I can only recommend that those interested in Linux clustering stick to online FAQs and HOWTOs; O'Reilly's offering on the topic was no more respectable.

I'm the author.

Are you looking for a book on cluster processor communication? Are you looking for message passing benchmarks? If so, this is not the book for you.

Clustering is not difficult. Those that try to pull the wool over your eyes and make clusters seem like rocket science are only charlatans wanting to waste your infrastructure budget.

I wrote this book for those people that aren't familiar with clustering, and want to get up to speed quickly and easily with Linux. I also included some reference material that I thought would save you time looking this information up on the web.

No, this is not the best book ever written. I'm a system administrator, not a English major. I've also got a sense of humor, and I've also tried to incorporate this into the book. I think it's a good read.

So all in all, if you're looking for fancy charts and complicated math formulas, then I suggest you stay away. If you'd like a cluster up with the least amount of fuss and the lack of stoicism, then yes, try my book.

This book provides background information on system administration, clustering, and distributed computing. Only 3 or 4 of the 11 chapters are directly related to clusters and distributed computing networks. The majority of the book covers system administration tasks that are relevant in any setting. The clustering chapters do not provide adequate detail to evaluate the options available.

As an introduction to system administration the book is acceptable, but the overview of clustering is too cursory to justify the title. The book is also poorly copy-edited, with some of the acronymns expanded (sometimes amusingly) incorrectly.

I found this book to be a good introduction and a "getting started" type of book, yet I found it to be somewhat incomplete and not very detailed in the steps to creating a simple cluster. Fortunately I had purchased some other books on Linux clusters that filled in the gaps for me. The book is also old and talks magically about the "new" 2.4 kernel that was out at the time. I would pass on this book, but since I got it used for $5, it was worth the price.

I would recommend the following two GREAT books on building your own cluster:

-Building Clustered Linux Systems (HP Professional Series) by Robert W. Lucke.

-Linux Enterprise Cluster: Build a Highly Available Cluster with Commodity Hardware and Free Software by Karl Kopper

Contains much useful advice about the environmental needs of a cluster. Especially power and cooling. Plus it describes ancillary equipment like racks and switches. The latter are important, because without fast communication between the nodes in the cluster, performance will rapidly degrade.

Bookman discusses the installation of linux on the nodes. Often, these will be Intel or AMD chips. A major point about having a linux cluster is minimising the cost of hardware, as well as using a free operating system. Hence the choice of the above CPUs.

Note that the book does not really go into the programming of the cluster in any detail. That is, what type of code can you write that takes advantage of the computational power in the nodes and in their distributed nature? You'll need another text for this.

Overall this book is nicely structured, easy to follow and builds very nice intuitive knowledge of clusters.

I feel that at some places contents are not detailed, for example chapter 4 on alternative file system, chapter 8 on parallel computing, and chapter 9 programming a parallel cluster leaves me little confused.

The author mixes his knowledge and humor to make this advanced topic a very palatable read. The mental model the author has is very well layed out, from cover to cover. At the end of the day, it's a book that I would recommend everyone having as part of their reference library.