OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD at kozoru

Contributed by grey on from the and they are undeadly regulars too, sorry about the delay dept.

Thanks to tony for writing in with the following, we appreciate the submission & apologize for the delay in posting about this noteworthy clustered OpenBSD setup:

I recently posted to advocacy@ about how we are using OpenBSD here at kozoru. Here is the original message: "We are working on a natural language processing system for parsing questions and getting back answers (think Ask Jeeves, except works). We are using OpenBSD on all our nodes in our cluster. Currently we have 82 running and processing Wikipedia. The nodes are simple x86 boxen, running 2.4G Celerons w/ 512M RAM, booting OpenBSD 3.7 off a 64M USB stick. For data storage we are using sqlite inside a 256M memory file system. Here is a picture of our first rack we had setup: http://wopr.drippingdead.com/~cdowns/cluster.jpg

Check out our website at http://www.kozoru.com for more information if you are interested on what we are currently doing."

Word is getting around the BSD websites, and since most of us at kozoru not only use OpenBSD as our workstation but we frequent undeadly.org quite often, I figured I would pass the story on here.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Venture37 (217.22.88.123) venture37 # hotmail com on www.geeklan.co.uk

    hey! Nice rack! :)

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (216.175.250.42) on

      Someday, son, all this will be yours...

      What, the curtains?

  2. By Fábio Olivé Leite (15.235.153.99) on

    See the word boxen right up there in the quoted text? This guy replying to the previous article was arguing that people should say boxes, that nobody says boxen and all. I guess the present article pretty much sums it up for that "boxe[ns]" discussion in the previous article.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (143.166.226.16) on

      you, my friend, have way too much free time on your hands.

      Comments

      1. By Fábio Olivé Leite (15.235.153.99) on

        Heh, it just happens that the previous article and its posts were still fairly fresh in my memory when I read this one, and the word boxen nearly sprang out of the screen. :)

    2. By Chris (24.76.117.234) on

      See my comments in the previous story. Your "60 million Elvis fans" logic intrigues me, though.

      Why didn't he say machines? Or, God forbid, computers! What exactly is the appeal of superfluous (read: useless) technical jargon?

      Comments

      1. By Fábio Olivé Leite (15.235.153.99) on

        OK, let's keep it on the previous story then.

  3. By Anonymous Coward (80.185.69.65) on

    They need to check their clocks for their home page. The calendar indicated July 19th. My time reads Wed Jul 20 21:28:22 CEST 2005 and I see fiji on xearth meaning every part on earth is either July 21st or 20th.

  4. By Kyle (128.174.209.48) on

    Hey - I do NLP (actually more like ASR) with OpenBSD. Can't run the AT&T FSM library, though (it's closed-source); so I have to use Linux occasionally.

  5. By Anonymous Coward (66.44.2.39) on

    OpenBSD: the choice of tattooed New Ballance wearing sysadmins everywhere!

  6. By Anonymous Coward (66.131.206.50) on

    What are you using to cluser OpenBSD with?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (212.144.112.76) on

      would be very interesting what's the software behind - what is used for the cluster? mpi, mosix, (dns)-round-robin, pfsync or what???

    2. By Matt Van Mater (63.164.202.130) on

      It seems pretty clear that there are a number of people interested in what makes this a 'cluster'. Does anyone here know those two guys well enough to pass the inquiry on so we can get some clarification? My guess is that we're talking dns round robin and some homebrew content synchronization scripts. I'd love to be wrong though.

  7. By foorfi (209.44.12.117) on

    Why do you run www.kozoru.com on Debian Linux and not OpenBSD?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (67.64.89.177) on

      Because Debian sucks goat ass?
      Because Debian sucks goat ass?
      Because Debian sucks goat ass?
      Because Debian sucks goat ass?
      Because Debian sucks goat ass?
      Because Debian sucks goat ass?
      Because Debian sucks goat ass?

      Comments

      1. By foorfi (209.44.12.117) on

        Nice Marco Peereboom. I dont know why you chose Anonymous Coward. Or am I mistaken?

      2. By Anonymous Coward (66.44.2.39) on

        In my opinion out of all the Linux distros Debian is the best. I kind of wish pkg_add handled dependencies as well as apt does. (The -r flag is a sign that we're getting there, but it still needs a little work.)

        Comments

        1. By Michael Knudsen (217.157.199.114) on

          What I like best about the debian package tools is all the stuff it knows you wanted to do but didn't say it should. For instance like the other day when I wrote "apt-get install apache", it just knew that I intended to type "apt-get remove ssh'' afterwards and acted accordingly.

          Good thing I like riding the bus to work.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (64.173.147.27) on

            I did the same thing the other day. Except mine deinstalled any 2.4 kernels, and kept only 2.6 kernels. Minor problem. 2.6 kernels have never actually booted on this machine (itanium POS), only the 2.4 ones. So now I have the 2.4 kernel marked 'dont-delete' 17 ways, and manually copied.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (69.36.252.2) on

      OpenBSD for performance and Linux for security.

  8. By Anonymous Coward (216.254.12.156) on

    Nice rack photo, but why the PIX at the top of the rack on the left?

    Not exactly a rousing endorsement of OBSD with that thing in there, unless, of course, that box is running PF off flash memory on that Intel MB ;-)

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (208.252.48.163) on

      Some people value using the best tool for the job over religious fanaticism.

      Comments

      1. By Luiz Gustavo (69.93.158.202) on http://hades.uint8t.org

        People also believe that sometimes mgmt comes up with some weird hardware because some sales person said some gibberish.

      2. By Anonymous Coward (203.58.120.11) on

        Anyone who thinks that a PIX is the best tool for any job is guilty of religious fanaticism. OK, maybe it would make a decent paperweight, or small boat anchor.

      3. By Lars Hansson (203.65.245.7) lars@unet.net.ph on

        Although that's obviously not the case here. It's a Cisco PIX after all.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (213.84.93.41) viper@dmrt.net on http://www.dmrt.net

      Layer 7 packet inspection is one.

      Comments

      1. By Richard Toohey (203.167.190.49) richardtoohey@hotmail.com on

        Does anybody know of a Layer 7 packet filter for OpenBSD / OSS? By this I mean re-directing traffic to web servers based on HTTP host headers. Would transproxy do the trick?

        Comments

        1. By henning (80.86.183.227) henning@ on

          'Layer 7 filtering' is another hogwash term.
          it's a (transparent and filtering) proxy.

          there's countless proxies available for OpenBSD, many in the ports tree, and if there's one missing for some protocol you need, they are pretty easy to write too.

          Comments

          1. By Richard Toohey (203.167.190.49) richardtoohey@hotmail.com on

            Thanks for the info.

            I'm looking at moving off an ISA server that redirects incoming traffic on one IP to a number of internal servers based on http host headers and my Googling revealed "layer 7 filtering" - (as well as transparent proxies and more) - lots more reading required ...

  9. By Anonymous Coward (69.2.33.129) on

    What's the blue thing between the Cisco switches and the rack of SuperMicro servers?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (142.109.90.79) on

      Flux Capacitor ...

    2. By Alexandre Belloni (82.233.187.15) on http://piout.net

      it's an openbrick-e (http://openbrick.org)

  10. By Anonymous Coward (64.81.117.127) on

    google OpenBSD site:kozoru.com
    one reference to OpenBSD

    36) The puffer fish on the openBsd t-shirt is not a girl
    some advocate hey

    Comments

    1. By Paul Tomlin (82.152.46.31) on

      John Flowers (the tatooed chappie) has some more to say on OpenBSD on his blog Lone Ronin

      Comments

      1. By SH (82.182.103.172) on

        John Flowers (the tatooed chappie) has some more to say on OpenBSD on his blog Lone Ronin

        Well, both of them have tatooes ;-)

        Comments

        1. By Paul Tomlin (81.168.14.14) on

          Oops :) Then it'll be the guy on the right I guess

          Comments

          1. By Paul Tomlin (81.168.14.14) on

            Or not! Maybe I should read my own links

  11. By Anonymous Coward (69.158.155.70) on

    Care to share which motherboards you guys are using? I've been meaning to build a new, quiet box so something running off a USB stick or flash card would be awesome. I could go out and grab anything but a motherboard that has been tested, 82 times ;) in production would probably be a good buy.

    Comments
    1. Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (69.158.155.70) on

        From reading the specs it looks like you are right about the SuperServer 5013C-M. Thanks!

        Has anyone else here used USB sticks in this capacity? I am wondering how reliable or flaky they are. By that I mean compact flash cards have a limited amount of writes so is it wrong of me to assume that is the case with USB sticks as well?

        Comments

        1. By seigemann (80.203.53.119) on

          Correct me if I'm wrong, but most (if not all) usb sticks use NVRAM(non-volatile RAM). This is basically a RAM-chip backed by an EEPROM, and you would only use the ROM when booting (copy ROM to RAM) or shutting down (copy RAM to ROM).
          You will be able to use this very much like a normal hard drive, and there's no worrying about read/write limitations.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (213.118.74.148) on

            Wrong.

            Most (all?) USB sticks use regular Flash-memory chips. That's right, the same stuff they put into CF cards, ...

            So there shouldn't really be a difference in reliability, durability, ...

            Comments

            1. By seigemann (80.203.53.119) on

              Ah, ok. Thanks for the correction :)

  12. By D. E. Evans (166.70.206.22) sinuhe@gnu.org on http://www.deevans.net

    The Macromedia Flash is quite dreadful. As well as being proprietary, unless you install the netscape binary for Linux, you will be unable to view it inline on an OpenBSD system. That doesn't seem to speak well for a site promoting its use of OpenBSD.

    Now that I see it's Flash, I have lost interest.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (195.224.109.30) on

      Wonder if it works with gplflash

  13. By tony (70.243.229.241) tony@kozoru.com on

    http://loneronin.typepad.com/ I will post to the misc@ list or something soon all the hardware and configurations we used to get these boxe[n,s] up and running.

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