Re: motherboards for diskless nodes
On Thu 02/24/05 17:00, Drake Diedrich wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 06:20:21PM -0500, Jamie Rollins wrote:
> You probably want to buy one in advance to test how reliable it is when
> PXE booting. We have a 64-node cluster with local disks that have no CDROMs
> or floppies, and we do maintenance and installs by net booting. It isn't
> reliable. We have to reboot several times to get the things to hear the
> PXE/DHCP replies and boot the pxelinux.0 image when attempting to reinstall
> a node. The motherboard is the MSI K8D Master with 2x Broadcom tg3 gigE.
> Many computers do netboot reliably in our environment (including laptops,
> older P-III Tyan boards, new Xeon Supermicro/e1000 boards, etc). Not all
> motherboard PXE/DHCP boot implementations are equal and up to the task for
> completely diskless use. If you switch to a slightly newer motherboard on
> deployment, all bets are off again (yes, made that mistake once, but had a
> friendly supplier who let us exchange parts until it all worked).
The failure to boot might be your switch has the Spanning Tree
Algorithm enabled. This will cause a delay in auto-negotiation which
goes over the PXE-allowed delay. At least, that's what happened here.
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