ok, I succeeded.
Thanks to all for helpfull comments.
------------------
Maxime Kinet
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Physique Statistique et Plasmas, CP 231
Campus Plaine - Boulevard du Triomphe,
1050 Bruxelles.
Tel. : +32-2-650.59.08
e-mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 01 May 2007, at 12:34, Panagiotis Christopoulos wrote:
On Monday 30 April 2007 13:04, Maxime Kinet wrote:
Hi,
I'm trying to set up my first cluster with diskless nodes. To achieve
that, I'm using PXElinux on a server, running Fedora Core 6, and a
NFS-mounted root partition on the node.
Everything works perfectly
(getting the IP address, loading the kernel and mounting the
filesytem) until the node has to run some binaries located into /sbin
during the boot process. Apparently it's unable to execute them
because they have been compiled with dynamically linked libraries and
not statically. The /sbin directory of the node is a simple copy of
the one of the server.
I suppose, that you have done something like, creating a /diskless
directory
inside your nfs,tftp,dhcp etc... server, copying files(eg. /usr/* )
from the
server, inside that /diskless dir with the same hierarchy, and this
resulted
in a structure which would home, your nfs exported, root fs of your
nodes.
I'm not an expert, but because you said about dynamic libraries, I
cannot
understand, why this is a problem, you copied /sbin inside /
diskless, but you
didn't copy /lib or /usr/lib? The problem with dynamic libraries,
starts
because your /diskless does not have these libraries.
I tried to avoid the problem using the busybox
tools, and it worked a bit better but then it couldn't execute bash
scripts such as rc.sysinit.
Have you created an init in your busybox, to chroot(exec
switch_root) inside
your nfs root fs after mounting it?
As anybody ever encountered such problems and what should I do to
solve it? recompile the kernel of the node or of the server? change
the distribution? Are there any other simpler method to proceed than
using PXE?
There are two things you can do. As Douglas Eadline said, it starts by
thinking if you want to reinvent the wheel or not. If you have time,
machines, if you know that your teachers won't get annoyed and you
can work
in a university lab, so you will not pay for the power supply
yourself:p
continue with fedora and all these brainstorming things. You will
learn linux
administration and propably you will do amazing things. If you
don't have
time etc. the guys in warewulf, are doing the same job for about 7
years, and
they provide you all this knowledge they gained, in a simple
installation
process.
Back in the technical stuff, from your sayings, I think that
something is
wrong with your /diskless dir(if you have one, of course). I cannot
understand why you want to use busybox. We use busybox when why
want an
initramfs to do specific jobs(such as unlocking and mounting
encrypted
partitions,yes, I know this is not the best example I could give)
before
chrooting inside our real root fs and exec init as Mark Hahn said
or if we
are running embedded. Also, I don't think that you have to change your
distribution, and if you don't like PXE, you can see how the guys
in LTSP
boot( I think they use both PXE and "etherboot" and you can make a
choice),
but for me, syslinux is fine!
This was my point of view, I hope I helped and if you want to ask
something,
feel free to send me a mail, or of course, ask again in the list,
Panagiotis Christopoulos
System Administrator
Technological Institute of Athens
Department of Informatics
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