Floppy booting or network bootrom

[Indraneel Majumdar]

One good reason is:
If your nodes are accessible to all, then someone might start using your
boot floppy for storing data, and if there is a power failure... (at least
you'll have to go round from node to node booting them)
Another reason:
Are you absolutely sure that your room is dust free, low in humidity,
doesn't have fungal spores... (or you might invite headaches trying to
discover booting problems, and making boot floppies every month)
Another reason:
Is your setup a high security system? Boot floppies can boot your brand of
the kernel, or it can boot theirs...

(I have used boot floppy for over a year since the bios of my node didn't
support netwok booting, but then I had only two nodes and they were right
beside me all the time.)

NIC booting is just a single time pain. Floppy booting is a pang.
\Indraneel

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, xiangdong shi wrote:

> I would like to hear opinion about the pro and cons of booting through
> floppy and booting through a bootable NIC for diskless nodes. The
> particular plan I have is building a 8 nodes cluster for myself. Then
> possibly goes larger if all goes well. Thanks.
> 
> Xiangdong Shi
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list
> Beowulf at beowulf.org
> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
> 

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