Clustering Old boxes

[DarkStal]

Greetings all!

Considering that i have a very limited expeirence with Linux, my work has put it upon me to investigate it even further and see if we can make use of some old Dell boxes that we have in stock. We have a handfull of these white boxes that all use to run Windows NT as an office desktop OS. The hardware and the OS outdated, my boss had read that Linux is really good at giving those old pieces of hardware a second chance. The boxes all run between 400-500 MHz with 128+ RAM.

So I have a handfull of computers that I can use to play around with as a test environment. What is requested the most of is how to set up a PBX using Asterisk and possibly get a cluster going for said PBX to not only supply the service but also to give me experience on how to set the thing up. Although this is all pretty much set up and it is just a matter of digging into it all, where can I start to get the whole cluster working? What options do I have?

So far I have only heard of Mosix by searching by "Linux Clusters/Clustering" though I am unsure of what to expect from it all. Since I work for a medical institution, security is a major issue and having phones open and available are also vital. This by no means will be part of a hospital or ER, though we have a "mobile" clinic that does basic checkups that we would like to try this out on (as in a low-priority department).

What have you all found to be the most reliable clustering interface/software? Do I have to install gentoo on both boxes as a single box and then install the clustering interface/software after the install or is it more complicated than that? Any clarification or recommendations as to where to look or start would also be appreciated on top of any other advice you all may have.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Dark§tal
_________________
"Attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."- Sun Tzu

[groovin]

hey dark,

regarding openmosix, check their site for apps that can migrate across a cluster. i dont think asterik was on there last i checked. if asterisk creates many process threads, then yes, it might work on openmosix (mosix is different from openmosix btw, i am assuming you mean openmosix since IIRC mosix is not free). but even if this setup were possible, i think you should think of what kind of cluster you need. do you want many machines thinking like one? do you want some kind of highly available failover/loadsharing cluster? and so on. without knowing too much about asterisk and pbx on linux in general, clustering them might not be a good idea/possible. perhaps someone else more knowledgeable can chime in on that.

[DarkStal]

Yeah that is the problem I am looking at. The issue in question is that we have a handfull (about 12) old Dell Boxes that only have a limited number of expansion slots. We would like to set up these computers without having to pay for any upgrades or the like, and since I can only fit so many IP Phone expansion cards per box we wanted to see if we could cluster them together, or if we would have to set up seperate PBX's and play some sort of networking jojo to get them to communicate together for transfers and the like. I have seen some that have been clustered, though they where proprietary 3COM boxes. We are just trying to be cheap and keep the hardware, cause as an IT department we aren't getting to much funding.The more stuff we can punch out per buck the better.

I am just curious to see if Linux would be a viable solution, and since my boss is somewhat familiar with what it can do as well we wanted to give it a shot. The boxes are just not meeting up to the new standards for medical applications so they are literally useless right now. We can't even recycle/donate them any more as most companies charge a fee for each box you donate in order to make sure the unit works. *shrug*

More research will need to be done in that case. Any other takers?

Thanks again for your help and advice, groovin. I'm gunna have to look around on the Openmosix site and see what I can't muster up.

Best wishes,
Darkstal
_________________
"Attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."- Sun Tzu