Re: installing an ultra-sparc cluster
I'm currently working on a beowulf cluster of dual Intel boxes, and the advice
I've seen and will repeat (since it works well) is to do one installation
yourself (probably the first, or "worldly," node should also be done
separately) then "clone" the one you just installed. To do this, consider
creating a boot floppy (assuming you have the drive) to boot over the network,
make a tiny root filesystem on the worldly node and export it via NFS, and then
copy a huge tarball of the last install over. This is how I'm cloning the
current cluster I'm workng with, which has 112 nodes with 128 to be added! So
you can see I'm kinda concerned with efficiency here :-)
I created a boot floppy which can boot over NFS, using /nfsroot on the worldly
node as the root filesystem for the booting machine. I can send you an image
(but not to the whole mailing list of course :-) ) and you can modify it by
mounting it on a loop device (if you don't have a floppy drive) to replace the
kernel (I can give config parameters and you can recompile for sparc
architecture), IP address, etc. By the way, if you don't have a bootable floppy
drive on your system you can copy the image directly to the hard drives (by
hooking them up to the worldly node, I guess)
The hardest thing to automate about the actual installation process is the
parts of each node that are not exactly the same (i.e. IP address). For me I'm
rigging BOOTP, but for a small cluster it would probably be best to just
configure that part by hand.
Depending on how many nodes you're dealing with, you may want to hear my
experimental and in-testing ideas about how to boot more than two at a time,
but at this point I wouldn't recommend it since I'm not even sure if it's
entirely possible.
What I used:
- <kernel-source>/Documentation/nfsroot.txt
- Diskless-HOWTO
- Diskless-root-NFS-HOWTO
- NFS-HOWTO
- NFS-Root mini HOWTO
- NFS-Root-Client mini HOWTO
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben Roberts, Class of 2001 (1st of millenium), founding member of MBLUG
/dev/null-- the inode of no return | C stands for Superior
(until devfs came along; now no inode)
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