[Rocks-Discuss] Rocks PXE Booting Problem

[Peter Mills]

Hi,

I would be grateful for any advice on the following problem.

We have a HPC Cluster which has Rocks 5.2 installed.
Each of the 10 Compute Nodes are set in the bios to boot to Hard Drive ONLY.

We recently had a power outage and when we brought the head node back up this was fine.
However, the compute node had PXE booted and reformatted and reinstall all over again, despite the bios being set to only boot from the hard drive.

Why does this happen?

Kind Regards

Peter Mills

Peter Mills
Senior Computing Technician
University of Plymouth
Room 106, Smeaton Building,
Drake Circus,
Plymouth.
PL4 8AA

Tele: 01752 586059
Fax: 01752 233376

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[David Power]

Hey Peter,

> We recently had a power outage and when we brought the head node back
up
> this was fine.
> However, the compute node had PXE booted and reformatted and reinstall
> all over again, despite the bios being set to only boot from the hard
> drive.
>
> Why does this happen?

That would been grub forcing a re-install of the system.

By default, when a compute node fails to shutdown cleanly, grub will
force a re-install of the node (via /boot/grub/menu.lst, rather than the
pxeboot install flag in /tftpboot...)

To stop this from happening on the nodes, you can stop the rocks-grub
service on the compute nodes:

$ service rocks-grub stop
[check the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to verify to boot order, it should
change from Rocks-Reinstall to standard Rocks boot]

To stop this from happening permanently you can add a chkconfig to the
<post> section in the extend-compute.xml file

<post>
...
chkconfig rocks-grub off
</post>

Cheers,
Dave

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