On Sun, 12 Aug 2007, Carsten Aulbert wrote:
Thanks for the link. In principle we have everything working already
that way, but want to "excel" a bit more:
No, no, no. You want to "ooffice" a little more...;-)
(1) Right now we use memdisk from the syslinux/isolinux family to boot
the dos image. Booting an exact floppy image works fine, but for some
part in (2) we might need more space than a 2,88 MB floppy or its
extended pendant gives to us. Thus we are currently trying to boot a hd
image which sems to be a bit trickier than a simple floppy image
(getting boot code, partition table right for example).
(2) We want to have some feedback from the process and don't want to
have an automatic reboot after a possible failure because in the worst
case this might "brickify" a node. Once I had the problem, that
automatic BIOS flashing worked, but one node - which looked similar but
behaved differently - was not able to finish the flashing procedure
successfully. Since I was monitoring the node I was able to redo the
flashing with a different option [1].
Anyway, that's the reason why we want to include a dhcp client and some
means, possibly a ssh or rsh client along with the needed packetdriver
to the image and notify the server that way, that it successfully
flashed the BIOS and set our custom settings correctly. Only after that
the nodes should continue FAIing.
No, that's reasonable -- I just didn't understand. Autoexec.bat is dumb
as a post in comparison even with /bin/sh, too. So it sounds like
somebody else came up with a better recipe for booting a small partition
and using dosemu -- that might give you better scripting and error
recovery. Nowadays there are a variety of small linux images readily
available on the web that you can burn to CD or wrap up as a netboot, I
think, that include dosemu.
PS: Anyone an idea, why my emails end up for moderators approval every
time? I have just checked the settings, but I'm subscribed (with this
from address) and everything looks fine for me.
It has to do with Don's two or three tier system of spam defense. There
is something like a whitelist, a greylist, and a blacklist, and
greylisted people are basically moderated. I don't know the algorithm
he uses to move people from one to the other, but I'd guess a request
and clean record spamwise might help.
rgb
[1] I still don't know what wsa special to this node. All other nodes
were happy to get the BIOS flashed, but this particular one needed a
special switch from the AMI(?) flash tool. I don't really remember what
was wrong since this was at the end of the past millennium ;)
In the worst case, the DOS environment is working autonomously and the
install server is 'guessing'
whether the BIOS is flashed or not on the clients,
e.g., by analyzing the DHCP logs, but this is not what we really want.
I'm hoping that the process described above IS what you want.
rgb
Regards
Henning Fehrmann
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--
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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