Re: [gentoo-cluster] Network Booting
Can someone please give me a hand on this issue. Thank you. chrosken wrote: Hi, 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? Any help is appreciated. Thanks! -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Network-Booting-tp1484p15077875.html Sent from the gentoo-cluster mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- gentoo-cluster@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-cluster] Network Booting
On 25/03/2008, chrosken [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Can someone please give me a hand on this issue. Thank you. You will need to consider OOB access to the servers via serial console, or perhaps iLo2 / DRAC (HP and Dell); having a way to remotely powercycle the boxes is also a pretty neat feature, so APC Masterswitch PDUs, or iLo2 / DRAC? Next step is to setup DHCP as your boxes need to grab a valid lease; their BIOSes need to be configure to boot off the network interface, then you can get a PXE menu built. You'll login via the serial console, or iLo2/DRAC to 'interface' with the network boot environment :) Go read, there's plenty about all this on the web. -- gentoo-cluster@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-cluster] Network Booting
On 20:01 Tue 25 Mar , Alex Howells wrote: On 25/03/2008, chrosken [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Can someone please give me a hand on this issue. Thank you. Next step is to setup DHCP as your boxes need to grab a valid lease; their BIOSes need to be configure to boot off the network interface, then you can get a PXE menu built. You'll login via the serial Go read, there's plenty about all this on the web. Hello, This can be useful. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml , Panagiotis(pchrist) -- gentoo-cluster@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-cluster] Network Booting
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 chrosken wrote: | 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? | | Any help is appreciated. | You want to take a look at: pxebooting grub + netbooting I remember seeing a demo from yamin at a gentoo UK conference demoing netbooting with a genkernel kernel Additionally ipmi would be interesting. ipmi is a standard for remote management bioses, many of them are network enabled. At least all dell servers have them, Sun hardware has something similar (they invented the ipmi standard IIRC) and HP hardware... wel you get the picture. Most of these BMC-chips allow for remote network control of bios settings including power. They are reachable as soon as the server is connected to a powersupply (doesn't have to be on) We've build a system of catalyst, pxe+grub-netbooting + agaffneys quick-install + puppet that uses pxe to start bare-metal servers and bring up to production config in 45 minutes. We're busy enhancing that with ipmi so we never need to go into the datacenter if we hire someone to rack the servers. All servers have a grub config which defaults to normal HD-based booting but also have an option to netboot and possible re-install. So, it's very possible with Gentoo :-) Regards, Ramon van Alteren Senior System Administrator Hyves.nl -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFHmZ5XwiVM6CtDHQ0RAge/AJ9Tk2KryygPjs7SUJEzeqNkna8zGwCfcv32 j979vjyGw7W6BBJi1L5kVUI= =NI0s -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- gentoo-cluster@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-cluster] Network Booting
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
Re: [gentoo-cluster] Network Booting
On 09:31 Fri 25 Jan , Ramon van Alteren wrote: I remember seeing a demo from yamin at a gentoo UK conference demoing netbooting with a genkernel kernel That's the genkernel-4 code. I've used it for diskless setups and it works quite nicely. It's living on gentooexperimental.org at the moment. We've build a system of catalyst, pxe+grub-netbooting + agaffneys quick-install + puppet that uses pxe to start bare-metal servers and bring up to production config in 45 minutes. Any chance you could share some puppet configs? It would be great to build a library of Gentoo puppet/cfengine stuff. Thanks, Donnie -- gentoo-cluster@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-cluster] Network Booting
Hi, 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? Any help is appreciated. Thanks! -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Network-Booting-tp1484p1484.html Sent from the gentoo-cluster mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- gentoo-cluster@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
