a simple beowulf setup?

[Jan Astalos]

Shane Martin wrote:
>  
> Looking for article/Howto/instructions on how to setup a boot floppy for
> (hard)diskless node.

I've been playing with this couple of months ago. If you don't have
spare memory for basic root filesystem and libraries in ramdisk it is
possible to boot whole filesystem via NFS. My floppy is syslinux-ed and
has only kernel image. The kernel must be configured with NFS-root
option (linux/Documentation/nfsroot.txt). Configuration of server and
client is described in "NFS-Root mini-HOWTO" and "NFS-Root-Client
mini-HOWTO" in Linux Documentation Project, although it highly depends
on your Linux distribution. I used RedHat 5.2 with 2.2.1 kernel and
there was some problems with NFS locking. I had to initialize loopback
device and start portmapper before mounting any filesystems. But I
didn't test it with newer kernels. It can be changed... 

Good luck

Jan

"Linux is like wigwam. No windows no gates apache inside..."