On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 11:22:56AM -0800, Brady Catherman wrote: > About the easiest way to get Linux installed on a headless node > though is to find another PPC system you are willing to spare for a > bit, boot the XServe into Firewire mode, and then install that way. > The Xserve gives you complete access to its internal drive so you > just mount it like normal.. its pretty slick and works really well.
Wow, thanks for the information. I was going to go the remote ssh install route but the firewire mode will work great. > Yaboot works great on systems with monitors but fails on headless > nodes. You have to use the serial console to boot the system (open > the serial console, and run "boot hd:,\\yaboot" I'm alittle concerned about the yaboot situation. I'll have to try to get that resolved as this machine is held in a cabinet with others and is acting as a sort of demonstration of Linux stability/reliability. > Apple gets "jumpy" when you tell them that you are thinking about > converting your cluster from Mac OS to Linux =) As they should be. One of the reasons for exploring Gentoo on Xserves is that we've had no shortage of problems with OS X server reliability. I've seen everything from random machine lockups to segfaults when using cp -rp (and slapcat). I'm also alittle troubled by the OS X upgrade process (not to mention the costs). Remote maintenance is also an issue. Its unfortunate that Apple did not provide a better collection of command-line tools (adding users comes to mind). Rant finished. > Either today or tomorrow I should have our final benchmark results > comparing MacOS to Gentoo PPC64 on our 32 node XServe cluster.. > When I get everything up and running I will let you know =) Definitely pass along the benchmarks. I'm fascinating by those sorts of things. I heard some amazing things the other day about PPC64 performance. I also was a bit concerned by that article disclosing MySQL performance problems on OS X. Thanks a lot, Brandon Edens
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