Youssef, I am not sure how well xCAT will work to deploy Debian. I noticed there is a community supported version of CentOS 7.6 built for 32 bit x86 available here: https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/AltArch/i386
I have not attempted to use the CentOS distribution linked above, but xCAT support for RHEL 7.6 is well tested, so there is a chance the distro above can be made to work with some minor tweaking. I think you will want to set your node netboot attribute to pxe and use nodeset to configure the correct boot files for the node. If the nodes do not support IPMI management, I think you will have to use some mechanism outside of xCAT to configure the network boot parameters from the node side and start the nodes booting. I think it is possible that you may be able to get this to work, but you are attempting an uncommon use for xCAT here, so you should expect it will probably take some effort on your part to be successful. Good luck, Nate From: Youssef Eldakar <[email protected]> To: xCAT Users Mailing list <[email protected]> Date: 01/27/2021 10:12 AM Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [xcat-user] Diskless legacy i386 nodes Thank you, Nate and Mark. On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 7:49 PM Nathan A Besaw <[email protected]> wrote: What operating system are you intending to use for the diskless image? I was thinking Debian, because it seems neither CentOS nor Ubuntu have i386 ISOs anymore. Are the nodes capable of network boot via PXE? Yes, they are, though no IPMI, but I already have a list of all the MACs. Is your idea to boot into a simple diskless image so you can mount the local disks to copy the data off? Exactly. So would you suggest I proceed to try Debian? I appreciate it. Youssef Eldakar Bibliotheca Alexandrina_______________________________________________ xCAT-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user
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