Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Bruce Hill <[email protected]> · Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:43:32 -0800

On 3/8/2013 9:34 AM, Bruno Martins wrote:

Bruce,

We have over 100 diskless linux x86 based host systems
that all boot using DHCP and PXE.

May I ask you what kind of computers you use? And what distro? How
long does it take to boot them all (after, say, a power outage)?

Hi Bruno,
Most of them are rack mounted 64 bit Supermicro PC's, and we have a few Dell
rackmount systems as well.    We run RHEL5 on most but have started moving
some to RHEL6.    We also have someone looking into real-time tuning of the
kernel so we can move more of our real-time controls off RTEMS based VME crates.

Re power outage recovery, the planned outages usually come up quickly.
The servers can be up in 5-10 minutes if there are no complications, and
the ioc hosts come up in about 2 min after the servers are up. We've got
them all on remote controlled PDU's for easy remote recovery.

With unplanned outages, it can be a 1/2 hr or more depending on what
additional problems were caused as the power went out.

Martin,

We use local disks and FAI (http://www.fai-project.org/).

I didn't know this tool, I'll look into it!

Martin,
Thanks for the tip on FAI!
How do you handle installing new IOC versions?
Does FAI do that, or do you use NFS to push or pull the new files
onto your ioc hosts?

Regards,
- Bruce

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System