[TriLUG] Read-Write PXE Boot Environment

[Kevin Hunter]

At 12:25p -0400 on Tue, 10 Jun 2008, Alex Kesling wrote:
> I'm currently trying to set up a PXE boot environment with five 
> secondary nodes and one root.  I'm wanting to set up the five nodes 
> each with their own root directory NFS mounted from the root node 
> (no local storage on the secondary nodes).

Sounds like you're building a LittleFe! (http://LittleFe.net/)  (Maybe
not, but a similar setup.)

>  I've already gotten an 
> odd sliced up PXE boot (read only root, with some strange 
> work-arounds for writing... it's how system-config-netboot sets it 
> up) working using system-config-netboot (this is on fedora 9) but 
> this doesn't appear to work properly with OpenMPI.   Has anyone 
> done a read-write root mount with PXE Boot before or do you have 
> any ideas?

I'm pseudo involved in this part of a project right now on
aforementioned LittleFe, but I don't know those details.  You may look
towards UnionFS, and these now out-of-date pages may be of some use to
you: https://wiki.cs.earlham.edu/index.php/BCCD .  You also may have
more luck on the Beowulf mailing lists (http://beowulf.org/).

Kevin