[HN Gopher] Warewulf is a stateless and diskless container OS pr...
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       Warewulf is a stateless and diskless container OS provisioning
       system
        
       Author : mooreds
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2025-03-06 18:45 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | mooreds wrote:
       | Website: https://warewulf.org/
       | 
       | Docs: https://warewulf.org/docs/main/
        
         | bluedino wrote:
         | And if you want to pay for support you can reach out to CIQ
         | 
         | https://ciq.com/products/warewulf/
        
       | mkesper wrote:
       | Weird this does not make use of IPv6. I'd thought this was a
       | given if you have tens of thousands of nodes.
        
         | 8organicbits wrote:
         | 10.0.0.0/16 supports 64k hosts, so it seems it would fit in
         | IPv4.
        
           | anderbubble wrote:
           | That's the thing: people don't put their HPC clusters on the
           | public Internet; so an internal IPv4 network just keeps being
           | fine.
        
         | wmf wrote:
         | It's from 2001 when IPv6 didn't really exist. I love IPv6 but
         | it's basically crackpot retrocomputing tech at this point.
        
           | generalizations wrote:
           | Can't decide if the retrocomputing you mean is the warewulf
           | or the ipv6.
        
             | wmf wrote:
             | IPv6 is retrocomputing. I don't know much about Warewulf.
        
               | generalizations wrote:
               | Huh. Did not realize we'd given up on that. Did the
               | industry just settle on IPv4 after all?
        
               | mcpherrinm wrote:
               | Really depends on who you ask. You still need v4 to be
               | "globally reachable", but v6 is optional.
               | 
               | AWS seems to finally be feeling the pinch of IPv4
               | exhaustion and is pushing v6 support everywhere now, and
               | starting to charge for v4.
               | 
               | Mobile networks already have, and many are natively IPv6,
               | with NAT64/464XLAT or other tech for bridging to v4.
               | Apple's App store requires apps to support IPv6-only
               | networks.
               | 
               | CDNs and clouds etc mean that websites don't even really
               | need to worry about their own IP allocation, and just let
               | their provider figure out exposing things worldwide.
        
         | anderbubble wrote:
         | We're always looking towards IPv6 support! And you _can_ do it
         | today, with a little bit of work. But it's been difficult to
         | prioritize in the main project when so few of our users (read:
         | maybe one) have expressed interest.
        
       | MortyWaves wrote:
       | Where does this fit in the Ansible + PXE boot vs Terraform vs
       | NixOS scale? Seems to be within that space, but before the
       | "infrastructure as code" phrase was coined.
        
         | anderbubble wrote:
         | It's PXE boot for mostly stateless node / disk images, with a
         | template-based overlay system for customizing the image as it's
         | applied to the node.
        
       | PAPPPmAc wrote:
       | I've been using Warewulf (&co.) for provisioning bare-metal
       | clusters for decades (back into the Perceus days between Warewulf
       | 1 and 2), it's a solid easy-to-comprehend tool that does things
       | in ways that are transparent and built from generic [u/li]nux
       | tools enough that they're not hard to think about when needed,
       | but automated enough you usually don't have to.
       | 
       | Definitely shows its research roots, best-tested with RHEL-
       | alikes, reasonably well tested with Suse and Debian, and you may
       | be in for some extra work if you need provision something else,
       | but that pretty much covers the common cases (and it integrates
       | with containerization tools if you need some specific environment
       | on the nodes).
       | 
       | It's a nice to have when you need to spin many nodes.
        
         | generalizations wrote:
         | Why use warewulf? Seems like there have got to be simpler
         | solutions for dealing with bare metal clusters than all of
         | this.
        
           | anderbubble wrote:
           | Perhaps you have not seen some of the other solutions out
           | there in this space.
           | 
           | Warewulf _is_ the simpler solution.
        
         | superb_dev wrote:
         | It's that old? I can't believe it took me this long to find
         | Warewulf! I've tried the more complex solutions and this looks
         | like what I've always dreamed of
        
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       (page generated 2025-03-06 23:00 UTC)