[gumwad] Brazillian gumstix wad - Countdown begins!

[Alexandre P. N. <al...@om...>]

Hi,

After Craig merged in the new buildroot, I guess that I'm getting short 
on excuses to not put the gumstix cluster online, I'll see if I can 
manage to put it online in the next couple of weeks, though I'm still 
very busy with other work stuff.

I plan to set up it more or less like this (not exactly news here, but I 
would appreciate some reviews):


The 200mhz stix will be put online. It'll be configured to be a front 
end; No other gumstix'es will be directly user accessible (though they 
will do the hard work). One public access account will be set up 
(perhaps later we can set up individual accounts),  and ssh access will 
be allowed to it.  The gumstix will lack internet connectivity (inspired 
by sourceforge's compile farm), the supported way of copying files to 
and from it will be exclusively by using scp. I know this is less user 
friendly than usual, but it helps avoiding security problems. As not 
everyone is aware, Brazil one of the countries (if not *the* country) 
with fastest response times to internet attack incidents, if the cluster 
is used to promote illegal internet activity (like being part of a DoS 
attack or something), that could put me and my company on a delicated 
position. I'm inclined to accept suggestions to making this more user 
friendly, if that happens to not make the operation less secure. I'm 
also short on available public IP addresses for a short term, so 
initially I may have to put the cluster's ssh service to run on a 
different port, I'm not sure whether or not people find that to be play 
killing but I'm somewhat used to it. Other restrictions may apply as the 
usage grows, but for now that should be it.

I'll set up the 200mhz stix (I flashed it with wrong uboot and now it 
thinks that it is a 400 mhz one, i'll have to fix that) first, and as 
soon as I have a few  nodes working I'll put it online, I expect to put 
the other operational as soon as it's considered satisfactory.

I also plan to use Craig's suggestion to mount the mmc's on the 
front-end stix as a single block device, thus deliverying about 3gb of 
cluster storage, but since the last time I did something like that was 
back in 99 (and was using local storage, not remote), I would appreciate 
some pointers to new information, specially on what I need to compile on 
the stix in order to do that.

- Alexandre