Installer

Installer is the shoichet cluster backend dhcp/tftp/anaconda installer.

The general idea goes something like:

• Node Attempts to PXE boot. This looks like DHCPing.
• installer responds to this DHCP with options telling the card where to pick up its bootloader and configuration.
• Node boots from this bootloader and configuration
• Node boots

Right now there are boot options for:

• cpuburn -- This runs (currently 4) processes which heat the cpu as much as possible. This is for power draw testing, and cpu burnin.
• node-fc6 -- This installs a node. It should be up and operating on condor after reboot.
• inter-fc6 -- This begins an interactive FC6 install, as if you booted from the install cd.
• local -- This aborts PXE booting, and continues onto the next boot method as configured in the BIOS. This is the default, it will be automatically chosen after a 10 second timeout.

Any of this can be overridden by the configuration files in /tftpboot/pxeboot.cfg/* Documentation for these files is available at: http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

Installer hosts a copy of the fedora core 6 i386 rpms, and a snapshot of updates (from sometime in January 2007). Please do not update the updates unless you plan on dealing with all the strange problems that may result from doing so.

Anaconda configuration files are in /kickstart, which is NFS mounted readonly for the sake of the anaconda installer.

The important script, node-ks.cfg contains rested settings that setup a node. Most of the details are in the post install section of that configuration file. Detailed information on anaconda can be found at: http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-8.0-Manual/custom-guide/s1-kickstart2-file.html

To get a machine to node-fc6 install, its mac address and staticly assigned ip address must be present in /etc/dhcpd.conf, and the dhcpd must be restarted after changes to this file. Sooner or later I will set up a web interface and database to make this easier.

More to come.