[Beowulf] RE:small distro for PXE boot, autostarts sshd?

[Greg Keller]

Have you ever considered Perceus (Caos has it baked in) from  
infiscale?  It's the simplest answer I've found to this question and  
scales very well.  You can use your favorite distro and tools and it  
puts it wraps up the minimum required pieces to load the machine with  
a "ram based root" that has symlinks back to an NFS server for any OS  
files you don't want wasting ram.  Can run diskless or set it the  
disks up for scratch/swap or whatever.

http://www.infiscale.com/

Cheers!
Greg

> 1.  pxe boot (easily)
> 2.  autostart sshd, allowing root ssh login (there is no
>  keyboard on the remote machine).
> 3.  contains smartmontools, parted, fdisk, etc., but not any desktop  
> pieces.