problems booting diskless nodes

[Greg Lindahl]

> I'm setting up a Beowulf on PC164 Alphas.  I do not have an "rdev" program
> to set the root device for the kernel image, so I tried declaring it
> manually by typing the kernel parameter "root=/dev/nfsroot" should this
> work?

Yes.

> I can mount the shared NFS partition using this, but it keeps
> giving me error message telling me that it is read only and does not
> complete the boot process.

Hm. Is it exported read-only?

showmount -e the.server.host

Is it mounted read-only? You call it a shared NFS partition, but usually you
have to have one per system, even if you share some of the files in it.
There's a fairly good HOWTO covering NFS booting, but it's aimed at a single
system.

> Another thing, my RARP server frequently stops recognizing the requests
> from the server, requiring me to reboot my server in order to get ti to
> work again, does anyone have any idea what might be causing this or how I
> might fix it?

Hm. RARP is a kernel built-in. You can examine the state of its info using

rarp --list

-- g