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:

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.


History | Software

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