On 15:45 Thu 24 Jan , chrosken wrote: > > Hi, Hello, > > We have a clusters of machine and would like to setup network booting. At > this time, we have to go to the data center and boot the machine manually. > We would like to manage it as best as we could where we can save time and > money. I heard network booting is a good way to go. I'm not sure how does > network booting work, and also not sure if this is possible with Gentoo > operating system. Sorry for the dumb questions, I am totally new to > Networking. > > Can someone please point me to the right direction?
If the only thing you want is to power on, your machinery, and nothing more(such as load a kernel via network, or create diskless nodes with a shared nfs root), then checkout two possibilities. The first one is to see if you have any hardware controller such as "hewllet packard's iLO(Integrated Lights-Out), or intel's ipmi (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) in your machines. If you 've got an IPMI device you will be able to use eg. ipmitool from another machine, to start your cluster, power off your cluster, and do some more management, eg. seeing temperatures and speed of fans. If you owe an HP proliant server with iLO, you will be able to telnet or ssh inside the software interface iLO provides(every controller takes an IP), and do some work, such as power on/off your machines again. iLO offers a web interface too, but I hate that, cause you have to pay to load another firmware to be able to do more.. For ipmi do a search in portage to see the tools available by gentoo (emerge --search ipmi). If your hardware is not so valuable to have such controllers, then hopefully you will be able to send a "wake on lan" magic packet, to power on you machines. (see in portage, net-misc/wakeonlan and net-misc/wol for such tools, and read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN). If you want something more than that, start by reading something like http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml It's about how to create diskless nodes with gentoo, and it's not what you want I suppose, but it has some doc about PXElinux and etherboot, and how to create a shiny dhcp server for this stuff(+more). Panagiotis Christopoulos (pchrist on irc) -- gentoo-cluster@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
