[Beowulf] raw ethernet

[Daniel Ridge]

Greetings,

On Jul 21, 2004, at 9:14 AM, Robert G. Brown wrote:

>  leeching off of arp
> tables somehow to achieve a semi-portable mapping between hostname and
> ethernet number on the flat network.

It's easy to take hardware too seriously. If you are building a cluster 
with
a private network, you don't need to worry about IANA and what they 
think
your Ethernet MAC addresses should be. Just staple your node number into
your hardware address* and be done with it. Essentially all network 
adapters
provide some way to load a user-supplied MAC address into the card and
nearly all linux network device drivers expose this facility.

* and make sure that the resulting ethernet address is a legit unicast 
address

Regards,
	Dan Ridge