[Beowulf] Mobo battery life in constantly on systems?

[David Mathog]

"Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu>
> And yeah, it is a real PITA if you have anything non-default in your
> BIOS settings.  Not so much a problem for clock settings, but if you
> have to set up peripherals or memory (in older motherboards)
> every time you boot...

Exactly.  In this case the defaults that really hurt are:

1.  on keyboard error = halt (should be continue)
2.  ECC = off (should be scrub)
3.  Boot order FLOPPY DISK MBA (should be MBA FLOPPY DISK)

The first one prevents a reboot (as there's no keyboard), the second
one will eventually lead to memory errors, and the third wipes out
control of the boot process via the master's dhcpd.

Hopefully someday they'll start using flash memory for BIOS
instead of a type that requires battery backup.

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech