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| 19:48.02 | Quanticles | hey |
| 19:48.14 | ScytheBlade1 | And request number two! |
| 19:48.14 | Quanticles | ? |
| 19:48.16 | ScytheBlade1 | ~asktoask |
| 19:48.16 | jbot | This is IRC. Don't ask to ask a question. Just ask your question and if someone's around, they'll be glad to help. |
| 19:48.54 | Quanticles | My research group is buying 20 servers, so I was hoping PXE can help me manage them |
| 19:49.27 | Quanticles | They're going to be identical as far as software goes - all running RHEL5.2 with the same configuration |
| 19:49.47 | Quanticles | From the tutorials, though, I don't quite understand where the OS is loaded from |
| 19:50.07 | Quanticles | Ideally what I'd like to do is set up a single server, say Server 1, and have the other 19 servers just copy from that server |
| 19:50.08 | ScytheBlade1 | In the case of red hat, one of the common ways is to use a kickstart file to define how to install the OS |
| 19:50.16 | ScytheBlade1 | Googling "kickstart red hat" would be of use |
| 19:50.37 | Quanticles | I dont want to have 20 separate installs, though, which is what that would do, right? |
| 19:51.04 | ScytheBlade1 | Yes, that is what it would do |
| 19:51.07 | Quanticles | I thought with PXE i could update just Server 1, then restart the other 19 |
| 19:51.15 | Quanticles | and then they would just match server 1 |
| 19:51.19 | ScytheBlade1 | That's a lot more complicated |
| 19:51.56 | ScytheBlade1 | Your clients would either (a) mirror the disk image every time they boot, moving many many gigs over the network every time they boot |
| 19:52.14 | ScytheBlade1 | Or (b) use an NFS share as the root 'drive' and quite literally run off of the server |
| 19:53.37 | Quanticles | Is (a) really that bad with gigabit ethernet, multicast, and RAID0 SAS? |
| 19:53.59 | Quanticles | Otherwise any change I do to one server I need to replicate across the other 19 |
| 19:54.25 | ScytheBlade1 | Depends on just how big the disk image is. Keep in mind that you're likely going to be writing the program to do the disk based replication. |
| 19:55.01 | Quanticles | What about NFS - doesnt that cache locally? |
| 19:55.41 | ScytheBlade1 | Can. That's all entirely up to you. |
| 19:58.49 | ScytheBlade1 | http://www.vdberg.org/~richard/Linux-on-SunPCi-mini-Howto/nfsroot.txt |
| 20:02.08 | Quanticles | Wow, when that was written I was in middle school :) |
| 20:02.29 | ScytheBlade1 | heh |
| 20:04.29 | Quanticles | So this is basically saying what options I need to give the kernel when I use PXE to load it? |
| 20:04.39 | Quanticles | And that I need to have NFS compiled in |
| 20:04.52 | ScytheBlade1 | And your NIC driver compiled in, along with DHCP support compiled in |
| 20:05.07 | ScytheBlade1 | Check the wiki in the topic for a general overview of how PXE works, and go from there with an NFS root |
| 20:05.34 | Quanticles | Ok, thanks |
| 22:45.49 | archangelpetro | moin :D |
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