Network Booting

[Mark Hahn]

> > I am trying to use DHCP with PXE booting to boot the PC's.  Any advice
> > toward this general direction, I am grateful for.
> 
> I have used LTSP to setup an ad-hoc cluster for PVM. It worked well.

I looked at LTSP before building my current cluster, since I wanted
nodes to be completely ephemeral (nothing installed on local disk.)
but there's not really anything unique in LTSP that you need - in fact,
my system is basically pure RH8, with minor tweaks to mount /dev/shm
in various places, populate a /var in one, start sshd, etc.

I'm about to add 10-12 dual-opterons to the existing 48 dual-xeons,
and it looks like I could actually get away with changing only the kernel.
(one line in tftpd or pxelinux config files.)  I don't know yet how much
trouble it is to run opterons in extended mode (64b, extra regs).  seems
like the main benefit is fast dram, which you get either way...

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