This is a basic summary, a more thorough post is available here.

The head node now has a POC nfsroot that boots into init (which it pulls via NFS). We are having some reliability problems after that (NFS time-out errors at different places in the init script). However, we learned a lot about how disk-less Linux works and we have a plan to fix it in the near future! The boot server can now boot the nodes, and give us BIOS, kernel, and (if we can sort out the NFS time-out) login on the serial server.

We also did quite a bit of work on the EVA5000 and come up empty handed. I tried to access the serial interface, only to learn that it was diagnostics only (no documented management interface) and Jason stalled on the Windows2000 management utilities. We’ll try again soon, I suppose that in the worst case we could use the one giant LUN as-is and not break it up… but let’s hope we can use the space a little more intelligently.

I also fixed the boot-time networking config on the server we made for the ua-developers club. I fat-fingered a conf file entry and the network didn’t come back after Jason power cycled the rack (QA testing I am sure ).

Stay tuned, the fun stuff is on the horizon.