[Beowulf] PXE boot with X7DWT-INF IB onboard card

[Duke Nguyen]

On 11/12/12 7:05 PM, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
> You can boot over PXE using normal network cables and boot over the 
> gigabit ethernet using a cheap ethernet
> router.

Thanks Vincent. Yes we gonna try that with a gigabyte hub. Just wonder 
anyone has other experience, for example PXE Boot on this link 
http://ulm.ccc.de/hg/pxeboot/raw-annotate/8c54643186a9/src/drivers/net/mlx_ipoib/doc/README.boot_over_ib. 
This PXEBoot lists our cards as supported.

D.

>
> On Nov 12, 2012, at 12:33 PM, Duke Nguyen wrote:
>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> We are still on the way of building our first small-cluster. Right now
>> we have 16 diskless nodes 8GB RAM on X7DWT-INF and a master also on
>> X7DWT-INF with 120GB disk and 16GB RAM. These boards (X7DWT-INF) has
>> built-in Infiniband Card (Infiniband MT25204 20Gbps Controller), and I
>> hoped that we can create a boot server on the master node for the 16
>> clients using IB connection.
>>
>> Unfortunately after reading, I found out that our built-card is too old
>> for Mellanox FlexBoot:
>>
>> $ lspci -v | grep Mellanox
>> 08:00.0 InfiniBand: Mellanox Technologies MT25204 [InfiniHost III Lx
>> HCA] (rev 20)
>>      Subsystem: Mellanox Technologies MT25204 [InfiniHost III Lx HCA]
>>
>> whereas FlexBoot requires at least Connect2X-3X to work with.
>>
>> My questions are:
>>
>>   * any body using the same (or similar main boards) and was able to
>> boot using PXE?
>>   * if PXE server with Infiniband is impossible, then it is OK with a
>> gigabyte connection? Or should we go for 16 disks for these 16 clients
>> and dont care much on boot over IB or IP? (more money, of course)
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> D.
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>
>