Installing Linux (without CD/floppies)

[Florent Calvayrac]

John Brookes wrote:
> Even if you _do_ need stable addresses, you can still avoid the labour
> involved in collecting the MACs. You can assign them addresses from a DHCP
> pool initially, but set them permanently when they boot. All of that can be
> scripted. 
> 
> Although these addresses'd be stable, they wouldn't be in order (confusing
> for maintenance). You could turn them on at, say, minute intervals to get
> the desired order, but - unless you've got some automated way of remote
> booting (PD boxes with remote control; onboard out-of-band cycling) - it'd
> probably be just as easy to collect the MACs.
> 

I just switched our cluster to clustermatic, but did not
manage to get the first stage working properly ; so I went
for PXE/DHCP thanks to our EEpro100+, discovering that PXE is not needed
(you can send an image and bootdisk with DHCP only) ;
and using the autodiscover function in clustermatic
(or Scyld), I see the MAC addresses without having the hassle
of typing them....So now the nodes download the second stage directly
  with DHCP (no first stage anymore) and boot in about 15 s total.

By the way, with Scyld, bproc or clustermatic, there is no need
for NIS, remote linux install, passwd distribution, and so on.




-- 
Florent Calvayrac                          | Tel : 02 43 83 26 26
Laboratoire de Physique de l'Etat Condense | Fax : 02 43 83 35 18
UMR-CNRS 6087         | http://www.univ-lemans.fr/~fcalvay
Universite du Maine-Faculte des Sciences   |
72085 Le Mans Cedex 9