[Beowulf] Anybody here still use SystemImager?

[David Mathog]

Greetings,

I have been using SystemImager, really just the Boel part, for 
building/rebuilding nodes for ages.  Those were all 32 bit (both the 
nodes and the Boel) and worked fine.  (Yes, I know, who still uses 32 
bit for anything?)  However, the one thing it wouldn't do is 
successfully install a 64 bit image because when it had to chroot
to run grub2-install it was going from 32 bit to 64 bit, and that 
doesn't work.

Unfortunately not much luck using the stable 64 bit Boel from 
sourceforge either.
The binary was from here:

   systemimager-x86_64boot-standard-4.0.2-1.noarch.rpm

While the target nodes can PXE boot into boel4 (64) this happens in the 
installation script:

# format disk, commands not shown
mount -t xfs /dev/sda3 /a
mount -t xfs /dev/sda1 /a/boot
mount -t xfs /dev/sda5 /a/home
# copy image onto disk, commands not shown
# install grub
chroot /a/ grub2-install #details omitted
Fatal: kernel too old.

So even though it is a 64 bit to 64 bit chroot, it STILL cannot run 
grub2-install.  The boel kernel is 2.6.21 but Centos 7 is 3.10.0 (or 
thereabouts).

Tried to build systemimager from github in Centos 7 but that didn't go.
Description of that here:

   https://github.com/finley/SystemImager/issues/11

Tried this too within the running 64 bit Boel:

cd /a
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/a/lib64
sbin/grub2-install -h
sbin-grub2-install: error while loading shared libraries: /a/usr/lib64
#previous line truncated on edge of screen

Tried messing about with LD_LIBRARY_PATH but it resulted in "ELF file OS 
ABI invalid" errors.

What I really need is a version of Boel which will chroot into a Centos 
7 system.
Anybody have one?  Failing that, is there another small PXE bootable 
linux distro, more or less like Boel but with a kernel near 3.10, with 
an initrd which loads a target script (by nodename) into busybox and 
runs it?

Thanks,

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