troubles with node startup

Sean Sturley sean at thepark.org.uk
Wed May 9 06:00:14 PDT 2001


I'm attempting to breath life into a mini beowulf cluster.
And I have two problems which i can't seem to find any info on.

Firstly,

I have built my master server its up and running. So far so good.
The login header shows as follows:

Sclyd Beowulf release 27bz-7 ( based on Redhat 6.2)
Kernel 2.2.17-33.beo on an i686
login:

so thats what I've installed......

I have made the boot floppies from within  X for the nodes.
When i boot the nodes ( they have been added to the beosetup configured
group)
These machines are pentium 233's with 64 meg of ram with a built in lan card
and an additional 10/100 netcard
(not the best spec in the world I admit - but I have been given  25 of them
FOC) on the second reboot (monte?) I get the
following message on the slave nodes screens:

VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for kswapd
VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for init
VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for init
VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for tar

This would continue until the end of time if allowed. I get this on any of
the nodes........

On the master server the beo status monitor shows:

cpu0 up(no) avail(no) cpu0(75/100%) mem(4/30) dsk(0/0) net(0/25000kBps)

On searching the net I have found info stating that the VM: error (under
normal Redhat Linux)  can be rectified by upgrading to the latest kernel.
Therefore is there a more recent version of the beowulf kernel or can I use
a later one from kernel.org ?

Secondly,
Is there a way to force the order in which the slave nodes boot the network
cards. On half of the machine the 10/100 card boots and process the RARP
info
and on the other half its the on-board 10meg lan card ( They are different
motherboards in about 11 of them)



Many thanxs


Sean







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