I finally decided...

[rsbriggs]

I finally decided...

After several weeks now of keyboard-pounding, hair-tearing frustration, I've finally settled on Red Hat 9.0 as my base distribution. I've done the Mandrake 9.1, Gentoo, Debian, and the SUSE ftp-install thing every spare hour of my days and weekends for two weeks now.....

I have one last thing to try - using the Red Hat openMosix RPMs and installing them. I'll know if that is going to work for me by the end of the day. If that doesn't just work "out of the box", I'm going to bag the idea of using clustering, too....

No more O/S changes. I've given up on Gentoo - it's not quite ready for prime-time on newer hardware, although I love the idea, and Mandrake just doesn't support the hardware I'm dealing with as well as Red Hat does.....

[rsbriggs]

It is also my opinion that openMosix clustering is not ready for prime time, either. All it seems to manage to do is to segfault the DF clients.....

No more experiments in that direction. :(

[IronBits]

Well, keep the door open for when that Biostar M7VIQ mobo gets there ;)
I'll be very interested in what you find out with the Rhine II NIC :)

[rsbriggs]

Yes - that is what I'm going to fall back to - just "plain old vanilla" net-booting, all starting from scratch again, since I wiped out all my prior installations.

The good news is, I get to use my own instructions, and the sticky thread. I'll correct anything wrong that I find along the way, or anything I just glossed over the first time through.

The process should be fairly bullet proof after I go through it again.....

[PCZ]

I have got 5 remote boot nodes running now and all appears to be working well.
It was a steep learning curve but worth it in the end.
It only takes a few seconds to add the mac address to dhcpd.conf and restart dhcpd.
After that you just plug the node into the network and your Folding a minute later.

[IronBits]

Oh no you don't... you don't get off that easy PCZ ;)
Windows 2000 TFTP/DHCP :thumbs:
Then you can relax, and I'll get the write up done as I replicate it over here :D
Good going to both of you! PXE only was the goal, and I guess we will have a *nix and Winders Server as hosts when all said and done. :hifi:

[Dyyryath]

I've been caught up in a ton of other things for the last week or two, so I haven't had time to read through all the posts on this topic thoroughly. Are we at a point where we could make an article from what rsbriggs & PCZ have learned? If so, is anyone willing to write it up? I'd like to start collecting this kind of stuff into it's own area on the Free-DC site. :thumbs:

[IronBits]

Not quite yet, but it's getting close for sure.
It needs to be a complete walk thru, step by step, so anyone that wants to do it can.
Right now, it's still more in the realm of 'guru' than 'aol' and only under *nix. ;)
There are/were NIC driver problems with almost everything rsbriggs was working with.
Bob started his own thread which I did a sticky on so that he could keep his notes and what not in one thread. :)
I'll do the same for PCZ when he goes for the windows server version.
Then I'll give it a go using both of their directions, one for *nix and one for windows based servers, all booting *nix clients.
I'll document it all as I go along, to make sure all the steps are there, and nothing gets left out.
Looks like many 'images' will need to be created, one for most motherboards with onboard nics and other variants.
Once the images start getting created, having a one stop shopping for those images on the Free-DC Server would be perfect :thumbs:
That's how I see it at this time anyways for pure PXE diskless booting and running distributed clients. :)