PXE-utilities ------------- This is a release of the SARA package of utilities that we use to boot our nodes with PXE-enabled network cards. This was developed because we always want to use the PXE-enabled network card as our first boot device. With pxelinux, which is a derivative of syslinux, you can specify with a PXE configuration file how the node must boot. This configuration is placed in, e.g. '/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg' directory. In our setup we have a default setup. The default setup is to boot from harddisk. When a node boots it fetches the default configuration file and the configuration file tells the node to boot from the harddisk. This setup is used for nodes that have already been installed by systemimager. At SARA we have developed the following strategy how to install a fresh node. 1) The ip-address in our setup is known for the new node. So we make a link in the '/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg' directory to a pxe config file which tells that it has to fetch the kernel en root filesystem from our bootserver, eg: 0A000A02 ---> default.node_install (10.0.10.2) 2) The client starts and uses the systemimager software to install the node. The last line of installation script connects to a daemon on the bootserver. This daemon will remove the PXE config file for this node. 3) The node reboots and will use the default pxe config file which will instruct the node to boot from harddisk. This release contains the following utilities: pxeconfigd) This is daemon that removes the pxe configuration file of a node. pxeconfig) With this program we can specify which pxe config file a node or nodes must use. This utility will create the links in '/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg' hexls) Is a utility that diplays a directory, and, if in this directory contains HEX files, it will convert them to IP-numbers. All these utilities are written in Python. I useful link about how to use Systemimager and the pxeconfig tools is: http://www.fysik.dtu.dk/CAMP/Niflheim/systemimager.html Comments or Suggestions mail them to: Bas van der Vlies http://www.sara.nl for more info about SARA.