Behind the scenes
In 2005, I decided to move the site to a scalable cluster architecture to handle the constant increasing popularity of the derkeiler.com network.
Hardware
At the time of this writing, derkeiler.com runs on a FreeBSD 16-node load balancing cluster with the following technical data:
29 CPU cores; 81 GHz; 70 GB RAM
Operating system
All nodes in the cluster run FreeBSD, which performs excellent as a cluster operating system.
Administration nightmare?
Many people ask me if it isn’t very time consuming to manage 16 servers. The short answer is: It doesn’t take longer than managing a single server.
The long answer:
All servers in the cluster run FreeBSD. Except for the fileserver all nodes are diskless and boot their operating system via PXE-Boot .
Each server starts the same operating system image, and mounts the individual configuration (like hostname, ...) from the fileserver based on it’s ip-address.
This technique is quite simple (once implemented), but has the big advantage that a change is immediately visible on all servers in the cluster.
