[Beowulf] Re: ECC support on motherboards?

[Perry E. Metzger]

Joe Landman <landman at scalableinformatics.com> writes:
> Robert G. Brown wrote:
>
>> Very interesting article, but 1 GB is still a bit tight.  The really
>> interesting times coming are in one year, when the motherboards comes
>> with linux in 2 or even 4 GB flash.  In one GB you can load a
>
> ... and until then we use CF->SATA converters and boot from 4 GB flash
> cards.  We have built working 4GB flash images of Ubuntu, Suse,
> Openfiler, and one of the RHELs.
>
> Mind you, creating such a thing is a non-trivial exercise, especially
> for RHEL and RHEL like systems.

It isn't so bad building a flash image for something like this. If you
want to play with it a bit primitively, you can install to a flash
card or a virtual disk configured to have the exact same layout, and
you can mass install to new ones by dd'ing a file system image.

I generally prefer to just bulk install boxes by PXE booting them
though -- less handwork. That requires a bit more work, but any SA
worth his salt knows how to do that sort of thing.

Kickstart and similar tools have taken a lot of the pain out of doing
mass installs, of course. It doesn't matter much if your boot media
are hard drives or 4G flash cards -- it is pretty much the same, you
just need to make sure you're not cramming too much stuff into the
root file system. Hell, 4G used to be a pretty big hard drive, you
don't even have to cram things in too badly if you're running some
sort of Unix-alike...

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com