On Sat, 3 May 2003 02:05 am, fsanta wrote:
Hi. Thanks. So there's no way I can get out of physically booting each machine with the new 8.2 cd or a floppy I make then no?
To bring up a 66 machine cluster I took a completely different approach. I call it "cloneboot" It extends the initrd ramdisk phase of Suse booting to copy a model machine onto the local hard disk and set it up during the boot process. Note that this assumes PXE capable network cards and identical hardware on all nodes! Over Gigibit ethernet I could get a chassis of 6 machines built, from unpowered unconfigured to 6 login prompts, all in 8 1/2 minutes. The only local configuration was to set them to PXE netboot. After that it all comes from DHCP and tftp. The scripts consist of a custom "/boot/initrd" file. This has an extended master "linuxrc" that calls scripts from /etc/clone/init.d/* to: 10get_params.sh # find out my IP and the model's IP 20network.sh # bring up the network 30mount_source.sh # NFS mount the model 40partition_target.sh # Partition and mkfs local HD (if nessessary) 50mount_target.sh # Mount local partition table 60copy.sh # rsync from root up 70customize # set local hostname 80umount # get ready to boot 99lastchance # to check before booting new image They are very simple, and not as general as they could be, but I'd be happy to share them and see them taken forward by the linux community. If this is of interest, mail me off list and I'll send a tar of the components. michaelj -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166