[Beowulf] Dual Boot in Master and Client

[Tim Mattox]

Hi Mark,

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 00:56:38 -0400 (EDT), Mark Hahn
<hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> > I would think you could do this with Warewulf.
> 
> I didn't look, but I suspect warewulf uses all the usual
> open-source tools.

Not sure what you mean exactly, but Warewulf itself is GPL'ed,
and it leverages things like yum, rpm, pxelinux or Etherboot, rsync,
etc.  You can install whatever Beowulf tools you want such as
LAM MPI, SGE, and pdsh for a small list of examples.  If you have
an RPM of whatever package, it's easy to install for the nodes.
If you have a SRPM it takes just a few more steps.

> > To switch from Linux to Windows, turn off the dhcpd server on
> 
> if warewulf uses pxelinux, you can much more nicely configure
> particular nodes to boot with particular default configs,
> including different kernels, windows, etc by providing per-node
> pxelinux.conf/ files.

For now, Warewulf automatically creates those config files for
pxelinux to do it's thing...  so your custom configs would get
clobbered by Warewulf when it generates it's own.  Similarly,
Warewulf rebuilds the dhcpd.conf file based it's node "database"
and config files.

I don't foresee putting any effort myself into making a dual
boot into Window's a config option for Warewulf directly.
However, if someone really needs this functionality, I doubt
Greg (gmk to his friends) or I would reject their contributed code,
as long as it was general enough to support dual/multi-booting
into a locally installed Linux on nodes as well.
-- 
Tim Mattox - tmattox at gmail.com - http://homepage.mac.com/tmattox/