Homefarm

Tools for deploying and managing a BOINC compute farm using Ansible and Arch Linux.

Homefarm makes it easier and faster to install, reinstall, configure, and update all your BOINC crunchboxes. It also saves your bandwidth: all your compute nodes will install and update from a local repository that lives on the control node.

There are a few assumptions:

• One machine capable of running Docker, to host the controller
• One or more x86_64 machines capable of running Arch Linux, to become compute or storage nodes
• You are aware of your local network configuration, and have IPs to assign to the nodes.
• All nodes are on a private network -- an SSH key with no passphrase will be generated for Ansible's use
• You're familiar with BOINC, projects, workunits, and so on

See the Release notes for all changes and full history.

Documentation

• Setting up a farm
  • Controller setup
  • Node installation
• Configuring your farm
  • BOINC configuration -- for compute nodes
  • Storage configuration
  • Using Gnatwren -- optional, but recommended
• Managing and maintaining your farm
  • Everyday farm ops
  • Add or reinstall a node
  • Backup or restore the controller
  • Using GPUs
  • Fixes and Unbreaks
• Problems and troubleshooting
  • If you've found a bug or have a suggestion, please create a new issue on Github.
  • Sometimes Arch renames packages and other such things, and this will cause the update script to break. If this happens to you, check the Fixes and Unbreaks page above, or file a ticket.