Red Hat and openMosix

If you are running a RedHat 7.2 or 7.3 version, this is probalby the easiest *Mosix install you have ever done. Choose the appropriate openMosix RPM's from sourceforge. They have precompiled kernels (as I write this 2.4.17) that work seamlessly , I have tested them on several machines including Latptops with PCMCIA cards and Servers with SCSI disks. If you are a grub user the kernel rpm even modifies your grub.conf. So all you have to do is install 2 rpm's

rpm -vih openmosix-kernel-2.4.17-openmosix1.i686.rpm openmosix-tools-0.2.0-1.i386.rpm

And edit your /etc/mosix.map Since this seems to be a problem for lot's of people let's go with another example. Say you have 3 machines. 192.168.10.220, 192.168.10.78 and 192.168.10.84. Your mosix.map wil look like this.

[root@oscar0 root]# more /etc/mosix.map 
# MOSIX CONFIGURATION
# ===================
#
# Each line should contain 3 fields, mapping IP addresses to MOSIX node-numbers:
# 1) first MOSIX node-number in range.
# 2) IP address of the above node (or node-name from /etc/hosts).
# 3) number of nodes in this range.
#
# Example: 10 machines with IP 192.168.1.50 - 192.168.1.59
# 1	   192.168.1.50	    10
#
# MOSIX-#  IP  number-of-nodes
# ============================
1 192.168.10.220 1
2 192.168.10.78  1
3 192.168.10.84  1

Now by rebooting the different machines with the newly installed kernel you will get 1 step closer to having a working cluster.

Most RedHat installations have 1 extra thing to fix. You often get the following error.

[root@inspon root]# /etc/init.d/openmosix start 
Initializing openMosix...
setpe: the supplied table is well-formatted,
but my IP address (127.0.0.1) is not there!

This means that your hostname is not listed in /etc/hosts with the same ip as in your mosix.map You might have a machine called omosix1.localhost.org in your hostfile listed as

127.0.0.1	omosix1.localhost.org localhost 

If you modify your /etc/hosts to look like below. openMosix will have less troubles starting up.

192.168.10.78   omosix1.localhost.org
127.0.0.1       localhost 

[root@inspon root]# /etc/init.d/openmosix start 
Initializing openMosix...
[root@inspon root]# /etc/init.d/openmosix status
This is MOSIX node #2
Network protocol: 2 (AF_INET)
MOSIX range     1-1     begins at 192.168.10.220
MOSIX range     2-2     begins at inspon.localhost.be
MOSIX range     3-3     begins at 192.168.10.84
Total configured: 3