[Beowulf] BIOS

[Geoff Jacobs]

Bruno Coutinho wrote:
> 
> 
> 2007/8/12, Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu <mailto: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 #.

DOS batch files were actually surprisingly capable. It's just that what
they could do was not as well documented as, for example, Bash is today.

-- 
Geoffrey D. Jacobs