[Beowulf] Dual Boot in Master and Client

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 00:32, Tim Mattox wrote:
> Hi Rajiv,
> I would think you could do this with Warewulf.
> http://warewulf-cluster.org/
> Just make the BIOS on each node first attempt to boot with PXE,
> and upon PXE failure, boot from a locally installed Windows on
> the node's hard drive.
That's a good idea.

In addition to that, I saw this project for Windows installs:
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

Depends if you want to re-install, or quickly boot an already installed
setup. Your suggestion is probably better.



> To switch from Linux to Windows, turn off the dhcpd server on
> the master, and reboot the nodes.  They should then come up
> in Windows.
> To switch back, you would turn on the dhcpd server on the master,
> and then using some "unknown-to-me" windows utility to remotely
> reboot the nodes, 

It seems possible to use Samba to do this,
using the "net rpc shutdown" command.
So assuming you run Samba on your head node you could probably reboot
your master mode from Windows to Linux then issue this command.