[Beowulf] motherboards for diskless nodes

[John Hearns]

On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 10:17 -0700, Craig Tierney wrote:

> >   why are you going diskless?
> > IDE hard drives cost very little, and you can still do your network
> > install.
> > Pick your favourite toolkit, Rocks, Oscar, Warewulf and away you go.
> > 
> 
> IDE drives fail, they use power, you waste time cloning, and
> depending on the toolkit you use you will run into problems
> with image consistency.
I agree - heck I'm work with large Beowulves every day.

but listen to what I said. For THIS APPLICATION in a small lab,
where a researcher is looking to homebrew a system, 
I firmly believe that putting IDE drives on each node and then
installing over the network is the way ahead.

We here on the Beowulf list can argue the benefits of diskless versus
disks. 
But for someone who just wants too get something working and off the
ground, I say go the 'conventional' route.


> I have run large systems of both kinds.  The last system was
> diskless and I don't see myself going back.  I like changing
> one file in one place and having the changes show up immediately.
> I like installing a packing once, and having it show up immediately,
> so I don't have to reclone or take the node offline to update
> the image.
Why take a node offline to do an update or a disk system?