[Oscar-users] Slaves cant boot from disc and hang booting of clients using 2.4.20-6bigmem

[Howell Silverman]

Hello,    I hope someone can help.   Environment is 8 Systems total, Dual Xeon, the master and the 7 nodes each have 4GB of memory, Master has 120GB system drive, 40GB drives in each node.   This is a standard load from RH 9 no changes.   Problem Description When I choose vmlinux-2.4.20-6bigmem for the oscarimage: At step 2, "Configure Selected OSCAR Packages", there are 3 things to configure: "Environment Switcher" - pick mpich "ntpconfig"            - pick default "kernel_picker"        - pick /boot/vmlinux-2.4.20-6bigmem In the "kernel_picker", if I choose /boot/vmlinux-2.4.20-6bigmem, there is a further option whether to not to use loadable kernel modules. 1) choose "use loadable kernel modules"     I can successfully build everything, and network boot the slave node.  After the network boot, I changed back the boot order to the hard disk.  Then The slave node cannot boot from harddisk.  Will check to see if there are any messages displayed. 2) choose "not to use loadable kernel modules"     Everything works until step 5.  When I tried to "Add Clients" to oscar,  the install_cluster hangs at: /opt/kernel_picker/bin/kernel_picker --bootkernel     /boot/vmlinux-2.4.20-6bigmem --bootramdisk N --networkboot N --kernelversion  --modulespath Below are 3 problems we encountered on the master node. 1) Something strange happened on the master node this afternoon.     Initially, the "df" commands gives 76% used on hda3.  And we wanted to find out which directory is so big.  Surprisingly, "df -ms /" gives 6gig as used space, and the recycle bin is empty.     After we went to the single user mode, and using "df", the percent used decreased steadily from 76% to 6%.  And 6% is consistent with 6GB.     We wonder what's going on? 2) The log files on /var/log, like messages, secure, often gets several GB.  There are lots of white spaces in the log files.  Is there a way to get rid of them? 3) Although I've commented everything in /etc/crontab,     sometimes the master node is writing to the hard disk, and the available blocks on the hard disk decreased rather fast, writing about 664000K every 10 minutes.  Is there anyway we can find which process is writing the hard disk?   Is this normal?