On Thursday, 07 August 2008, at 15:03:24 (-0400), Tim Mattox wrote: > I think a better approach than using NFS-root or LiveCDs is to use Perceus in > this situation, since it has been developed over many years to handle this > sort of thing (diskless/stateless beowulf clusters): > http://www.perceus.org/ > It leverages PXE booting so all you need to do on a per-node basis is enable > PXE booting in the BIOS. The primary limitation I see would be if your > windows machines are set up to use DHCP to get their IP addresses from > some server that is outside your control, since Perceus would need to take > over DHCP services to do its magic.
At the risk of being slightly off-topic, Perceus actually has no problem working with a separate DHCP server. It has to be properly configured to hand out the payload, of course, but it works fine. Michael -- Michael Jennings <m...@lbl.gov> Linux Systems and Cluster Admin UNIX and Cluster Computing Group Bldg 50B-3209E W: 510-495-2687 MS 050C-3396 F: 510-486-8615
