Re: multiple motherboards
From: Robert E A Harvey (robertharvey_at_my-deja.com)
Date: 09/08/03
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Date: 8 Sep 2003 13:51:09 -0700
eas-lab@absamail.co.za wrote in message news:<3f5c79be$0$64724@hades.is.co.za>
> This is fascinating.
> What's it good for ?
Not much. I wanted to prove I could do it. I had a target market for
multiple X workstations for seismic navigation systems, but it fell
through.
I've been running one copy of folding@home on each board just to prove
I could do it.
> Perhaps an 'ample' server could be built out of a stack of cheap
> CPU mother boards ?
I'm not sanguine. You can get a 3.4GHz cpu and motherboard for half
the cost of what I have, and it has less ram in total. There is a lot
of otherwise useless network traffic for the file accesses, including
swap. The only way to limit this is to have much too much ram on each
node.
> I'm guessing that you have documentation to guide you ?
I googled for pxe booting and copied from there. There is loads of
info about linux diskless workstations, although much of it is about
thin workstations where the actual application runs on a server. I
didn't want what LTSP have built, I wanted the apps to run on the
local hardware, with remote file systems.
The traditional root is bootp/tftp but the diskless machine needs a
mechanism to be told where to boot from and what to boot. The epias
come with something called PXE which does not need configuring - it
grabs the relevant info from a DHCP server instead. What the clever
folk have done is come up with a way to basically use PXE to load the
boot code that used to be plugged into NICs as a rom, and that runs
bootp/tftp instead.
All I did was create a fstab file which had everything mounted nfs
except the root, and define loghost to be the master board so there
was no local version of /var/log
> Is this knowledge 'captured' somewhere ?
What knowledge?
The only thing that I claim as orginal is the diode-or'd power supply
startup, and the idea of the control of the reset lines on the slaves
by the master.
But frankly, they are both trivial as well.
I started with
http://www.ltsp.org/documentation/pxe.howto.html
Most of the setup info came from:
http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php
http://www.wlug.org.nz/DisklessWorkstationNotes
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Diskless-HOWTO.html was useful but not
directly relevant to pxe
http://netboot.sourceforge.net/english/index.shtml is very
informative, but again most of it was already covered by the pxelinux
project
I currently have a complete copy of my installation in the tftp root,
with the special /etc/fstp which does not contain a swap file. Swap
is mounted by a script in init.d which points to /tmp/`hostname`.swap
- all of which were made using mkfile on the master.
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