Beoboot-install help!

[Rick Niles]

> Yes, that will work. But what if I already have a number of nodes running
> and I want to add in new nodes? Will that try to write to existing nodes?

Well yes, but if you have the same partitioning scheme it won't affect
the old ones.  It will just re-write what was is already there.  If
the new disks/nodes have a different geometry then you can even
partition them differently and the old disks will get written with old
scheme, again not problem. (see the different geometries in
/etc/beowulf/fdisk files)

The only case where beofdisk won't do what you want is if you want a
different partitioning scheme on the new nodes/disks but they have the
same geometry as the old disks.  In case, the Scyld team felt that if
your advanced enough to have different partition schemes on different
nodes, you're advanced enough to either write a modified beofdisk
shell script for your setup or you can bpsh fdisk each node by hand.

That is, beofdisk is a help for newbies and for people happy with default
or at least homogenous configurations.  If you want something wacky you
should be calling sfdisk or fdisk directly yourself.

> I encountered the above scenerio recently, and it seems that beofdisk try
> to write to all nodes, regardless of existing or new nodes, although it was
> unsuccessful on the former.

unsuccessful? How's that?

	Does this help?
	Rick Niles
	Scyld Computing Corporation.