Joe Landman wrote: > Well RHEL is annoying in that if you decide to use a custom kernel and a > software raid, you are, for lack of a better term, toast (if you stick > with their tools/config).
My compute nodes aren't that complicated. The straw that broke this particular camel's back was a decision (presumably by Mandriva, maybe by RedHat) to change in the kernel config BLK_DEV_IDE and BLK_DEV_IDEDISK from y to m, similarly, DEV_AMD74XX (and etc.) also changed from y to m. As a consequence, they went from a system where a simple initrd would boot anywhere (as all the needed drivers were built into the kernel) to one where a much more complex initrd ended up being highly machine specific. In terms of having it "just work", having the disk drivers built into the kernel is lot simpler. Ubuntu 8.04.1 also has these as modules, and it has an immense initrd. (Even so, it might not have worked on my S2466 systems because the initrd did not build an AMD74XX module.) On the plus side, I did finally figure out how to PXE boot the PLD rescue CD, which in the last week has helped me escape from a couple of tight spots. The tricky part was that the online instructions said to use this in the APPEND line: initrd=rescue_pld_201/rescue.cpi,rescue_pld_201/custom/custom.cpi and that doesn't work, at least not for me. The two cpio archives are treated as if it was one file name, which of course does not exist. For future reference, it is done this way: 1. download and mount the PLD rescue cd ISO, copy the file hierarchy into /tftpboot/rescue_pld_201 (or whatever) 2. Put this in /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default LABEL PLD_X86_201 KERNEL rescue_pld_201/boot/isolinux/vmlinuz APPEND initrd=rescue_pld_201/rescue.cpi root=/dev/ram0 3. Put this in /tftpboot/message.txt PLD_X86_201 : PLD rescue disk 2.01 (hdX disks) PXE boot a node, chose PLD_X86_201 on the PXE menu on its console, and it comes up at the text prompt for the PLD rescue CD. This provides a lot more tools than boel, but it is still light enough at 58M to boot over a 100baseT network. Regards, David Mathog [EMAIL PROTECTED] Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
