slave node problem

[david silverman]

The department here just upgraded the PCs, so there were quite a few 
obsolete pentiumMMX computers with 64M laying around, so I thought I'd try 
one of these beowulf clusters for fun. Up unitl the early 80's I was a unix 
system admin, so I am not a total novice, but it has been a few years since 
I've done anything with unix (let alone linux), so I don't remember 
everything and some commands seem to have changed.

I have the $3 Scyld -8 CD. The front-end node seems to work fine. The slave 
nodes, though don't get past getting an IP address. After getting the IP 
address, it just keeps repeating 'neighbor table overflow'. It seems to 
recognize the etherlink III 3c590 NIC fine during bootup. The PCs are 
connected together through just a cheap hub. Prior to the arp, there was 
the message: ***WARNING*** No MII transceivers found. Reviewing the past 
postings, I've seen people with similar problems, but nothing I do seems to 
get past this point. I can't change the NIC and these PCs won't boot off a 
CD. I'm not sure how to make a stage 2 boot floppy. The front-end 
recognizes the slave, but it never gets past the 'down' stage after moving 
the MAC and pressing apply. The harddrives on the slaves already have linux 
installed, and I wanted to repartition them, but beofdisk -q does not see 
the slaves, although beosetup/daemon did see the NIC and supply an IP address.

So, what should I check next?

Also, are only PCI NICs allowed?

Thanks