[Beowulf] small distro for PXE boot, autostarts sshd?

[David Mathog]

There are a million distros, and many "small" distros, but these seem to
be optimized for desktop use.  Surely there are a few out there that can
do the following:

1.  pxe boot (easily)
2.  autostart sshd, allowing root ssh login (there is no
  keyboard on the remote machine).
3.  contains smartmontools, parted, fdisk, etc., but not any desktop pieces.

I have been using boel and PLD for various maintenance tasks, but
neither one of these meets all of the criteria. boel is great for
running scripts, but here I want remote access to a command line.  PLD
has all the tools, but at least on the target in question, it doesn't
start the network properly.  (Also even if the network is manually
started, which does work, there is a password on root, and I don't know
what it is.)  boel has an sshd binary, but so far I have not been able
to make it work automatically in a script.  If anybody has, please share
those lines of code.

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech