Richard Cook wrote:
> After banging my head on the desktop trying to get the diskless nodes to
> boot off the server I have finally admitting defeat and am calling for
> help!
Do the nodes support PXE boot?
Earlier this year I setup diskless booting on Debian. If you google
"debian pxe boot" you should find a couple howtos. Ubuntu should be
almost the same.
Basically I installed:
tftpd-hpa
syslinux
nfs-kernel-server
dhcp3-server is running on another machine. The interesting lines on in
the dhcpd config are:
subnet 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0
{
poll { range 10.0.0.100 10.0.0.254; }
allow bootp; # not sure if this is needed
filename "pxelinux.0";
next-server 10.0.0.1; # this is the tftpd server
}
I copied pxelinux.0 to /var/lib/tftpboot and created
/var/lib/tftpboot/pexlinux.cfg/default with the contents:
LABEL foo
kernel etch/vmlinuz
append vga=normal initrd=etch/initrd.img root=/dev/nfs
nfsroot=10.0.0.1:/nfsroot/foo ip=dhcp rw
Makre sure the files in /var/lib/tftpboot are world readable. (file mode
644, directory mode 755).
To create the nfsroot I used debootstrap (which can also be used to
create an Ubuntu install). After deboostrap ran I modified the
nfsroot/foo/etc/fstab to look like:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/run tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/lock tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/lib/nfs tmpfs defaults 0 0
10.0.0.1:/home /home nfs
auto,defaults,rw,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 0 1
I pulled that from the Internets so I am not sure it is all needed, but
it hasn't hurt. I also have the following line commented out. You might
need it:
#10.2.22.10:/nfsroot/mpi /.nfsroot nfs
defaults,ro,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 0 0
The nfsroot/foo filesystem is nfs shared readonly (that rw option the
pxe config probably should be ro). To make changes to the nfs systems I
use chroot on the nfs server. It is possible to use aptitude and similar
tools to easily install packages. Before starting the chroot I run the
following:
mount -o bind /proc /nfsroot/foo/proc
mount -o bind /home /nfsroot/foo/home
Unfortunately I am probably forgetting something. It was 8 months ago.
Hopefully there is enough to get you going.
If you are using the mpi version of povray install mpich2 from source.
The Debian package is buggy. By default mpich2 installs in /opt. The nfs
server shares that readonly. The fstab line for the nfsroot clients is
just like the line for /home.
--
sg