[Beowulf] A couple of interesting comments

[Ashley Pittman]

On Fri, 2008-06-06 at 10:39 -0500, Gerry Creager wrote:
> 
> 2.  BIOS had a couple of interesting defaults, including warn on 
> keyboard error (Keyboard?  Not intentionally.  This is a compute
> node, 
> and should never require a keyboard.  Ever.)  We also find the BIOS
> is 
> set to boot from hard disk THEN PXE. But due to item 1, above, we
> never 
> can fail over to PXE unless we load up a keyboard and monitor, and
> hit 
> F12 to drop to PXE.

I can think of at least one cluster where the opposite has been true and
PXE boot has been the default.  The problem with this is if the head
node PXE boots on the customers network and gets automatically
re-installed as a windows workstation everybody gets egg on their face.
Yes even "modern" BIOSes are bad but localboot first is a sensible
default.

Ashley Pittman.