[Beowulf] GPFS and node ids

[Jose Duarte]

I am just sending this slightly off topic message to the Beowulf list in
the hope of anybody having come across this problem. This is a long
ongoing problem that I had put aside for a while, I'm just having
another go at it now.

I've been trying to install IBM's GPFS parallel file system in our
xServe blades (running RedHat 8).

I first clone all nodes from a master image (using systemimager). Once
this is done I install the rpms for GPFS and RSCT in each node
separately and I compile the kernel modules successfully. 

But I'm hitting a problem when creating the RSCT domain as a previous
step for GPFS. Apparently all nodes get assigned the same nodeid so I'm
getting an error like:

node33: 2632-068 This node has the same internal identifier as node30
and cannot be included in the domain definition.


I suppose this is because we've cloned all the nodes. But the
installation of GPFS was made from clean in each node separately and
after cloning. It seems that there is some kind of "seed" from which the
nodeid is created that is the same in all the clones. Also when trying
the command "mknodeid" it will only say that the node has already an id
assigned so I can't really change it.

Anybody has seen anything similar? Any pointers much appreciated

Thanks in advance

Jose


-- 
Jose Duarte
MRC Functional Genetics Unit
Department of Human Anatomy and Genetics
University of Oxford