GitHub's Metal Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#81

Post by iofj » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #29

iofj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big issue I'm having with that is that it involves trusting vendors to get network boot right. Especially when it comes to the looping part of "loop until DHCP gets a response" it becomes a problem. One of the cheap vendor tries 30 times and then goes to a boot failed screen after trying the disk. Also, 1 time out of a 4-5000 or so network boot fails. Not sure why.

If you have IPMI on the server this doesn't become such a big problem - you can reasonably trigger resets/reboots if it's not up after a given amount of time.

We buy the cheapest server that meets our needs, and buy it in somewhat larger quantities (often double what was originally envisioned for less than was originally budgeted). Much more efficient.

But it does mean no IPMI. However I built a small circuit that sits on a power cable that can interrupt said power cable with a relais that sits on a bus plugged into our server, so we can do the reboot thing.

I've been meaning to redo that power cable circuit using wifi as the linking technology, now that we have esp8266 available.

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#82

Post by otterley » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 8:36 PM UTC

stephenr wrote: post #79

otterley wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better question, in my mind, is why they'd choose Ubuntu over CentOS or RHEL, since they're running on Dell hardware, and Kickstart is far, far superior to Debian/Ubuntu's PXE install (and preseeding is awful to configure). My org went through a lot of pain because of this choice (which preceded me) and I'd hate for anyone to go through what I went through. Also Dell's maintenance tooling barely works on Ubuntu at…

> why they'd choose Ubuntu over CentOS or RHEL Maybe they'd actually used them before. CentOS is a turd of a distribution, I'm certain the only reason it has any marketshare is because it's the only supported "free" OS for cPanel/WHM which a lot of web hosts provide for non-technical customers.

> CentOS is a turd of a distribution

What's the matter with it?

Re: GitHub's Metal Cloud

#83

Post by q3k » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 3:04 PM UTC

scott_karana wrote: post #72

q3k wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer packages, sane LTS policy, easier to get non-free firmware/drivers going (as in, the default CD comes with them), seemingly more support from third parties. They're both pretty awful due to their automagic(al tendency to break down in mysterious ways), but if I have to choose, I'll go with Ubuntu. Disclaimer: My main box runs Gentoo and I own no Mac machines, if that changes anything in your vision of Ubuntu us…

Drivers are definitely a big deal on desktops, but for servers?...

There's a lot of exotic hardware on servers (enterprise RAID controllers, converged and 10GbE NICs, SAN HBAs, IPMI configuration utilities...).