[Beowulf] Re: recommendation on crash cart for a cluster room:fullcluster KVM is not an option I suppose?

[Mark Hahn]

>> I'm not sure why you keep going on about bios updates.  they're easy and
>> automatable, so not a real issue for clusters.  no offense!
>
> Mark,
>
> I don't think you've had a look at that many vendors, right? Mostly a
> single vendor?

completely true - besides our quite a few dl145 and dl145g2 nodes, I've 
only done floppy-pxe bios updates on some oem tyan systems.

> Our reseller has some magic tools that let them generate a
> bios-flashing boot disk with a non-standard default setting. But this

well, I didn't say that the vendor provided these pxe images - 
we normally have to fiddle with dosemu and with the dos boot files
to make them work and non-interactively.

> tool does not allow AHCI to be turned on. I had to manually manipulate
> every single node after flashing. My crash cart came in quite handy.

ugh.  do you have SOL or similar, that might be scripted with expect
to do the AHCI enabling?  also, this is AHCI for sata, right?  I guess
I had the impression that AHCI could be selected by the driver without 
bios help...