> This may be a stupid question, > but it is a problem which lots of centres have > worked on, and have solutions for. > Please bear with me! > > > When installing a fresh node in a cluster, > we would like it the first time to boot over the > network. The second time it boots, it should boot from > its own hard disk. > There is a solution for this in these parts - but it is > not very elegant. > Can I first ask what methods people have for doing this? > Are there any blindingly elegant ways of doing it? > > > Also, if we started to use Linuxbios, is there any way > Linuxbios could help with this task. > I suppose that I am rather naively asking "Hey, in Linuxbios > is there any way of easily chaning the boot order after I have > booted for the first time"
well, kind of. It does depend what you are booting from. If you use a 256K BIOS chip you are going to always have to netboot anyway (or potentially always boot from HD). If you use DoC however you have plenty of space to put in a mini Linux distribution that can see if the hard disk is formatted and has a system on it and if so pivot_root to it (and even kexec the kernel on it if you like), otherwise partition the hard drive and rsync a distribution over from a server, and then boot it. As you can do all this in userspace it is very simple, and can be quite flexible (it can for example rsync updates every boot so you can keep your hd in sync). Potentially you could also do this from a small compact flash if you have a free IDE channel. Justin
