[Beowulf] Changing BIOS settings on nodes

[Honest Guvnor]

Greetings,

We would like to change the BIOS settings on our compute nodes to
enable PXE booting which is disabled by default (AMIBIOS on Intel
D875PBZ Pentium 4 motherboard). Reading and writing with /dev/nvram
seems to work as expected but reboot fails because of a test against
the checksum of the previous BIOS settings. Is there a way round this?

The nodes have no video card, there is no support for a serial console
in the BIOS but there are floppy disk drives. Any thoughts on
alternative ways to change the BIOS?

We have the fallback option of putting an Etherboot floppy disk in
every node when we want to reinstall but would like to avoid this if
we can,

Andy.