[Beowulf] Hypothetical Situation

[Mark Hahn]

> You'll need to spend a few work weeks/months building some nice quasi 
> automated scripts and documentation to help the folks build their kernels 
> and put them into an appropriate form.

I can't imagine why this would take even a day of work,
assuming you use plain old PXE to boot the nodes, already 
have a table of MAC addrs, and are comfortable with simple 
suid script programming:

pushkernel(machinename, kernelfile):

$mac = grep $machinename mac-table-file
ln -s $kernelfile /var/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/$mac
powercontrol -r $machinename
sleep 180
if (cant ping $machinename)
	ln -s fallbackimage /var/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/$mac

(powercontrol is a simple perl script I use to talk to my APC power thingies.)
hooking this into a batch system shouldn't be hard.

physically installing the kernel on a machine and booting it locally 
seems pointless.  "lilo -R" is great for trying out new kernels, though.
I understand someone has added this feature to grub, but haven't seen it myself.

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