Clustering Novena

Server clustering is a topic I’ve been cirous about for a rather long time, from back in the Slashdot days where one would constantly “imagine a beowulf cluster of” any given low-powered device. With modern clustering software, such thoughts become practical reality. And with some cardboard, everything goes together nicely.

To start with, I cut up some shipping boxes, laid the mainboard on top, and made some marks with a pen. Then I used a drill to make the holes. Overkill, but it works. Here’s what it looked like after drilling:

After that, it was time to zip-tie everything down. Everyone loves a zip tie. The nice feature of cardboard is that the ties bite in and hold securely. All of the ties we had were too big to go through the mounting holes, so everything was simply secured to the cardboard itself. As a bonus, SATA disks could be mounted securely.

The cardboard was strong enough to allow me to mount the power supply, giving it a good amount of heft. The IEC connector goes over the SATA disk, which keeps everything secure. I tied down the cable bundle, in order to keep it from swinging around. Overall, the result was a very secure setup.

Now the configuration has come down to a software problem. Now that the hardware is set up, what do I run on it? Software is much easier to fiddle with than hardware, and this is a fine use for hardware that would otherwise have gone unused in the Kosagi office.