[Beowulf] BIOS

Bruno Coutinho coutinho at dcc.ufmg.br
Sun Aug 12 16:12:52 PDT 2007


2007/8/12, Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu>:
>
> On Sun, 12 Aug 2007, Carsten Aulbert wrote:
>
> > Thanks for the link. In principle we have everything working already
> > that way, but want to "excel" a bit more:
>
> No, no, no.  You want to "ooffice" a little more...;-)
>
> >
> > (1) Right now we use memdisk from the syslinux/isolinux family to boot
> > the dos image. Booting an exact floppy image works fine, but for some
> > part in (2) we might need more space than a 2,88 MB floppy or its
> > extended pendant gives to us. Thus we are currently trying to boot a hd
> > image which sems to be a bit trickier than a simple floppy image
> > (getting boot code, partition table right for example).
> >
> > (2) We want to have some feedback from the process and don't want to
> > have an automatic reboot after a possible failure because in the worst
> > case this might "brickify" a node. Once I had the problem, that
> > automatic BIOS flashing worked, but one node - which looked similar but
> > behaved differently - was not able to finish the flashing procedure
> > successfully. Since I was monitoring the node I was able to redo the
> > flashing with a different option [1].
> >
> > Anyway, that's the reason why we want to include a dhcp client and some
> > means, possibly a ssh or rsh client along with the needed packetdriver
> > to the image and notify the server that way, that it successfully
> > flashed the BIOS and set our custom settings correctly. Only after that
> > the nodes should continue FAIing.
>
> No, that's reasonable -- I just didn't understand.  Autoexec.bat is dumb
> as a post in comparison even with /bin/sh, too.
>

It's dumb, but not so dumb. :-)
Th syntax is crappy but it has this feature:
http://www.robvanderwoude.com/errorlevel.html

OBS: REM is a comment initiator like #.
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