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

[Prentice Bisbal]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>> Even with IPMI, you still need a crash cart of some type to initially
>> set up IPMI in the system's BIOS. At the minimum, you need to set the IP
>> address that the IMPI interface will listen on (if it's a shared NIC
> 
> afaik, not really.  here's what I prefer: cluster nodes normally come
> out of the box with BIOS configured to try booting over the net before
> local HD.
> sometimes this is conditional on the local HD having no active partition.
> 
> great: so they boot from a special PXE image I set up as a catchall.
> (dhcpd lets you define a catchall for any not nodes which lack a their own
> MAC-specific stanza.)  when nodes are in that state, I like to
> auto-configure
> the cluster's knowlege of them: collect MAC, add to dhcpd.conf, etc.  at
> this stage, you can also use local (open) ipmi on the node itself to
> configure the IPMI LAN interface:
>     ipmitool lan 2 set password pa55word
>     ipmitool lan 2 set defgw ipaddr 10.10.10.254
>     ipmitool lan 2 set ipsrc dhcp
> 
> none of this precludes tricks like frobing the switch to find the port-MAC
> mappings of course - the point is simply that if you let unconfigured nodes
> autoboot into a useful image, that image can help you automate more of the
> config.

My cluster nodes' IPMI share their physical port with the primary NIC.
Before using IPMI, I had to enable it in the BIOS and then assign it an
IP address in the BIOS, too. I didn't think of using ipmitool. I wonder
if I could do all that using ipmitool, without enabling IPMI in the BIOS
first.  Anyone know for sure?

--
Prentice