BIOS

[Steven Timm]

It depends to some extent on which motherboard you are running.
The Intel L440GX series, which is most of what we have here at FNAL
currently, allows to direct the BIOS I/O out one of the COM ports,
usually COM2.  We have some clusters where we have hooked these
up to a console server and been able to access all the BIOS from there.

Intel has a very nice client to do this on the Windows side as well,
unfortunately it can only cover four nodes at once and they are not
planning to expand it.

It would in theory be possible to extend vacm (from VA Linux) to do
this but the last I talked to their developers they weren't
moving this way.

Steve Timm

------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven C. Timm (630) 840-8525  timm at fnal.gov  http://home.fnal.gov/~timm/
Fermilab Computing Division/Operating Systems Support
Scientific Computing Support Group--Computing Farms Operations

On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Jared Hodge wrote:

> Howdy (That's Texan for "hello"),
> 	I've got a question about setting BIOS settings on a cluster's nodes.
> The way I've been going about making changes is moving the keyboard and
> monitor to all of the nodes.  I'm sure this isn't what everyone does.  I
> imagine there's a way to put the settings on a floppy or maybe even send
> them over  the network, but I don't have any experience with this.  Has
> anyone done this?  What's the typical way of doing this on one of the
> really large systems where moving a keyboard and monitor from node to
> node would be impractical?
> --
> Jared Hodge
> Institute for Advanced Technology
> The University of Texas at Austin
> 3925 W. Braker Lane, Suite 400
> Austin, Texas 78759
>
> Phone: 512-232-4460
> FAX: 512-471-9096
> Email: Jared_Hodge at iat.utexas.edu
>
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