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Linux installation on the remaining PCs is similar to that described in the Loading the Master PC document, with one essential exception:
The software is installed via NFS mounting of the CDROM drive on the Master PC (which contains the RedHAT installation CDROM).In the case of the hrothgar project, this modified strategy is necessary since only the Master PC has a CDROM drive.
This "Brute Force and Ignorance" strategy of doing a full NFS Linux load on each of the remaining PCs is tolerable since the total number of PCs is small. For large Beowulf systems (e.g., the 116 node Naegling machine at CACR/Caltech), this approach would be ludicrous, and a Cloning Procedure involving full disk copies is more appropriate.
Contents
Before NFS-based loading of the remaining PCs can be started, the essential steps described in the Prepping The Master PC document must be completed, including
Historical Remark: This last item should seem trivial, but it actually accounted for an entire day's effort in the birth of hrothgar. When the PCs were initially plugged into the switch, none of the link lights activated. After a full day of searching for complicated explanations, the ethernet cables were examined and found to be the wrong kind (crossover, instead of straight-through)! Grumble ... .
The essential modification of the procedures from the Prepping The Master PC document comes in the selection of the installation medium. At the Installation Method window (shown below), select NFS image and click on the Ok button.
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The installation program will then drop a sequence of network configuration panels. Select Static IP addresses from the Boot Protocol panel. The next two screens (Configure TCP/IP and Configure Network) will ask for IP addresses and network names. The Netmask (255.255.255.0), Default Gateway (192.168.8.40), Domain Name, and Nameserver IPs are the same for all non-master nodes. The machine-dependent values are as follows (following the naming and numbering conventions described in the Know Your Network section of the Preliminaries document:
| PC | Name | IP Address |
| PC 1 | dan01 | 192.168.8.41 |
| PC 2 | dan02 | 192.168.8.42 |
| PC 3 | dan03 | 192.168.8.43 |
After clicking on the Ok button of the Configure Network panel, a new NFS Setup panel will appear, as shown below.
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The values needed in these fields are as follows:
| NFS server name: | 192.168.8.40 |
| Red Hat directory: | /mnt/cdrom |
Enter these values and click the Ok button. If all goes well, the system will fall into the standard Linux loading sequence. If not, there is most likely either a problem with the network parameters/connectivity or a failure to mount and properly export the CDROM drive on the Master PC (as described in the Exporting hrothgar's CDROM Drive section of the Prepping the Master PC document). Try again.
Once the NFS mounting is successful, Linux loading on the non-master PCs procedes as in the Master Loading Document, with two minor exceptions:
One probably could/should consider reductions in the selected RedHat packages on the secondary PCs (e.g., the whole system could get by with a single, on-line documentation set). This obvious "refinement" was only partially attempted during the initial installations on the hrothgar system.