[Beowulf] Re: 1000baseT NIC and PXE?

[David Mathog]

Joe Landman wrote:
> Why not use a USB stick with gpxe.USB?

Gave gPXE.USB a try using the motherboard's 100baseT NIC.  gPXE started
after the right BIOS settings were entered and the USB showed up in the
boot list. Unfortunately it used MAC "ad:ad:ad:ad:00:00" instead of the
actual hardware MAC "00:e0:81:22:cc:3d", so DHCP wasn't set up to send
it anything other than an address.  ^B to get into the gPXE command
line, but it wasn't accepting or echoing keyboard input.  (Possibly
terminal output was going out the serial port, anyway, it seemed to be
locked up at the command line.)

How does one make gPXE use the MAC it finds on the NIC instead of 
ad:ad:ad:ad:00:00?  The nodes on this system are not interchangeable,
node1 has data that node2 doesn't, and so forth.  The cluster is soon to
become heterogeneous. So the master does need to know who and what it is
responding to. 

If there are multiple nics how is gPXE configured to use a particular
one?  (If they have different hardware I guess just include that one
driver, but what if there are two the same?)

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech