> I will be preparing installation of Linux cluster and I'm thinking about > "diskless" solution as well. My only conern is throughput - I don't want > to get stuck with congested network. Are you (or anybody else) using > diskless nodes and could say how they behave?
This is all the rage these days... Mt Ida College is building a hierarchical diskless cluster (http://extreme-linux.com/werewulf.html) and will have a HOWTO up soon. My advice is to set your PXE client settings to "Continuous Retry Mode" IAW
http://www.intel.com/support/network/adapter/pro100/bootagent/tti017.htmthen you can follow a contemporary HOWTO like http://www.stanford.edu/~alfw/PXE-Kickstart/PXE-Kickstart.html to set up your DHCP server... if network contention at boot time is still an issue, look for a multithreaded / multicast tftp server (see http://frank.harvard.edu/~coldwell/diskless/).