Network Booting

[chrosken]

Hi,

We have a clusters of machine and would like to setup network booting. At this time, we have to go to the data center and boot the machine manually. We would like to manage it as best as we could where we can save time and money. I heard network booting is a good way to go. I'm not sure how does network booting work, and also not sure if this is possible with Gentoo operating system. Sorry for the dumb questions, I am totally new to Networking.

Can someone please point me to the right direction?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

[chrosken]

Can someone please give me a hand on this issue.

Thank you.

chrosken wrote:

Hi,

We have a clusters of machine and would like to setup network booting. At this time, we have to go to the data center and boot the machine manually. We would like to manage it as best as we could where we can save time and money. I heard network booting is a good way to go. I'm not sure how does network booting work, and also not sure if this is possible with Gentoo operating system. Sorry for the dumb questions, I am totally new to Networking.

Can someone please point me to the right direction?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

[Justin Bronder-2]

On 24/01/08 15:45 -0800, chrosken wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> We have a clusters of machine and would like to setup network booting. At
> this time, we have to go to the data center and boot the machine manually.
> We would like to manage it as best as we could where we can save time and
> money. I heard network booting is a good way to go. I'm not sure how does
> network booting work, and also not sure if this is possible with Gentoo
> operating system. Sorry for the dumb questions, I am totally new to
> Networking.
>
> Can someone please point me to the right direction?
>
> Any help is appreciated.
>
> Thanks!
> --

Sounds like you want to be in another room and tell the machine to boot?  If
so, you're looking for Wake on Lan support which is dependant upon your
motherboard and network card.  Google should help you learn more, and it
appears support does exist in baselayout,
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113880


--
Justin Bronder

[George Robb]

Hi

Are your machines PXE enabled?  What type or style of cluster are you  
using?

A few good google key words: PXE, diskless, thin clients, nodes

Here are a few starter links:
http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php
http://www.linux-sxs.org/internet_serving/pxeboot.html

Almost any OS can boot diskless or via a network boot method.  Gentoo  
is a wonderful Linux "flavor" give it a try!

Hope this helps,

George



On Jan 24, 2008, at 5:45 PM, chrosken wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> We have a clusters of machine and would like to setup network  
> booting. At
> this time, we have to go to the data center and boot the machine  
> manually.
> We would like to manage it as best as we could where we can save  
> time and
> money. I heard network booting is a good way to go. I'm not sure how  
> does
> network booting work, and also not sure if this is possible with  
> Gentoo
> operating system. Sorry for the dumb questions, I am totally new to
> Networking.
>
> Can someone please point me to the right direction?
>
> Any help is appreciated.
>
> Thanks!
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Network-Booting-tp14846666p14846666.html
> Sent from the gentoo-cluster mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> --
> gentoo-cluster@... mailing list
>

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[Ramon van Alteren]

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chrosken wrote:
| We have a clusters of machine and would like to setup network booting. At
| this time, we have to go to the data center and boot the machine manually.
| We would like to manage it as best as we could where we can save time and
| money. I heard network booting is a good way to go. I'm not sure how does
| network booting work, and also not sure if this is possible with Gentoo
| operating system. Sorry for the dumb questions, I am totally new to
| Networking.
|
| Can someone please point me to the right direction?
|
| Any help is appreciated.
|

You want to take a look at:

pxebooting
grub + netbooting

I remember seeing a demo from yamin at a gentoo UK conference demoing
netbooting with a genkernel kernel

Additionally ipmi would be interesting. ipmi is a standard for remote
management bioses, many of them are network enabled. At least all dell
servers have them, Sun hardware has something similar (they invented the
ipmi standard IIRC) and HP hardware... wel you get the picture.

Most of these BMC-chips allow for remote network control of bios
settings including power. They are reachable as soon as the server is
connected to a powersupply (doesn't have to be on)

We've build a system of catalyst, pxe+grub-netbooting + agaffneys
quick-install + puppet that uses pxe to start bare-metal servers and
bring up to production config in 45 minutes. We're busy enhancing that
with ipmi so we never need to go into the datacenter if we hire someone
to rack the servers.

All servers have a grub config which defaults to normal HD-based booting
but also have an option to netboot and possible re-install.

So, it's very possible with Gentoo :-)

Regards,

Ramon van Alteren

Senior System Administrator Hyves.nl
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[Athinaios Politis]

On 15:45 Thu 24 Jan     , chrosken wrote:
>
> Hi,
Hello,

>
> We have a clusters of machine and would like to setup network booting. At
> this time, we have to go to the data center and boot the machine manually.
> We would like to manage it as best as we could where we can save time and
> money. I heard network booting is a good way to go. I'm not sure how does
> network booting work, and also not sure if this is possible with Gentoo
> operating system. Sorry for the dumb questions, I am totally new to
> Networking.
>
> Can someone please point me to the right direction?

If the only thing you want is to power on, your machinery, and nothing
more(such as load a kernel via network, or create diskless nodes with a shared nfs
root), then checkout two possibilities. The first one is to see if you
have any hardware controller such as "hewllet packard's iLO(Integrated
Lights-Out), or intel's ipmi (Intelligent Platform Management Interface)
in your machines. If you 've got an IPMI device you will be able to
use eg. ipmitool from another machine, to start your cluster, power off
your cluster, and do some more management, eg. seeing temperatures and
speed of fans. If you owe an HP proliant server with iLO, you will be
able to telnet or ssh inside the software interface iLO provides(every
controller takes an IP), and do
some work, such as power on/off your machines again. iLO offers a web
interface too, but I hate that, cause you have to pay to load another
firmware to be able to do more.. For ipmi do a search in portage to see
the tools available by gentoo (emerge --search ipmi).

If your hardware is
not so valuable to have such controllers, then hopefully you will be
able to send a "wake on lan" magic packet, to power on you machines.
(see in portage, net-misc/wakeonlan and net-misc/wol for such tools,
and read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN).

If you want something more than that, start by reading something like
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml
It's about how to create diskless nodes with gentoo, and it's not what
you want I suppose, but it has some doc about PXElinux and etherboot,
and how to create a shiny dhcp server for this stuff(+more).

Panagiotis Christopoulos

(pchrist on irc)
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[Donnie Berkholz-2]

On 09:31 Fri 25 Jan     , Ramon van Alteren wrote:
> I remember seeing a demo from yamin at a gentoo UK conference demoing
> netbooting with a genkernel kernel

That's the genkernel-4 code. I've used it for diskless setups and it
works quite nicely. It's living on gentooexperimental.org at the moment.

> We've build a system of catalyst, pxe+grub-netbooting + agaffneys
> quick-install + puppet that uses pxe to start bare-metal servers and
> bring up to production config in 45 minutes.

Any chance you could share some puppet configs? It would be great to
build a library of Gentoo puppet/cfengine stuff.

Thanks,
Donnie
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[Ramon van Alteren]

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Donnie Berkholz wrote:
| On 09:31 Fri 25 Jan     , Ramon van Alteren wrote:
|> I remember seeing a demo from yamin at a gentoo UK conference demoing
|> netbooting with a genkernel kernel
|
| That's the genkernel-4 code. I've used it for diskless setups and it
| works quite nicely. It's living on gentooexperimental.org at the moment.

Thanx, I wondered where that went.

|> We've build a system of catalyst, pxe+grub-netbooting + agaffneys
|> quick-install + puppet that uses pxe to start bare-metal servers and
|> bring up to production config in 45 minutes.
|
| Any chance you could share some puppet configs? It would be great to
| build a library of Gentoo puppet/cfengine stuff.

Yup, we have no problem with that.
I'll start setting up some kind of sharing mechanism later this quarter.
To be honest they're currently in bad shape because we speed-rolled out
the recipes over our serverpark. In the meantime puppet upgraded from
23.1 to 24.1 which we didn't have time for.

So most of it are highly customized class-files tied closely to our
environment. I'll see if I can make some time this weekend to go through
them and see what's usable for the community.

We're planning to rewrite the entire library to module-based class files
over the next three months. Those would be far more useful to the wider
community, I was planning on releasing those.

Regards,

Ramon van Alteren

Senior System Administrator Hyves.nl
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[Alex Howells]

Good Morning :)

> We have a clusters of machine and would like to setup network booting. At
> this time, we have to go to the data center and boot the machine manually.
> We would like to manage it as best as we could where we can save time and
> money. I heard network booting is a good way to go. I'm not sure how does
> network booting work, and also not sure if this is possible with Gentoo
> operating system. Sorry for the dumb questions, I am totally new to
> Networking.

We've got probably 500+ machines deployed in total using a network
boot environment at my work - http://www.bytemark.co.uk.  It's simple
enough, although some of the concepts can be a little hard to grasp
when you're just getting started; leads to interesting possibilities
as you can give customers access, a la
http://www.bytemark.co.uk/dhshell

    *  DHCP  - each range of IPs (subnet) needs to be able to
broadcast + obtain leases.
               This is easily accomplished with ip-helper-address, if
you're using Cisco ;)
               Saves running a DHCP server on every VLAN!

    *  TFTP  - something to dish up the kernels, something which has
the pxelinux.cfg tree.

When the systems boot, they will obtain a DHCP lease and you need to
configure the boxes to try and boot off their internal NICs before
trying local disks or CD-ROM drives.  Additional values are passed in
the DHCP lease to tell the boxes where the TFTP server is, you can
have simple menus via PXELINUX.

It's helpful to have console access (IP KVMs, serial lines) to
interface with all this.  It's also helpful to have PDUs which take
SNMP commands so you can cycle the boxes on demand, or IPMI / iLOM I
guess.

How you choose to boot the images from that point is up to you ;)
We've got things deployed so that network booting is there as a method
for installing servers, for rescuing data when required, for fixing
'common' problems like b0rked kernel upgrades and firewall rules gone
slightly awry.

Thus, you may have quite a lot of reconfiguration to do:

    *  Configure boxes via BIOS to boot off NICs
    *  Install hardware to ensure remote powercycle capability
    *  Install hardware to give you serial/console access.

I'd be happy to try and answer any specific questions you may have :)

Alex
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[Alex Howells]

On 25/03/2008, chrosken <ordonezivan@...> wrote:
>
>  Can someone please give me a hand on this issue.
>
>  Thank you.

You will need to consider OOB access to the servers via serial
console, or perhaps iLo2 / DRAC (HP and Dell); having a way to
remotely powercycle the boxes is also a pretty neat feature, so APC
Masterswitch PDUs, or iLo2 / DRAC?

Next step is to setup DHCP as your boxes need to grab a valid lease;
their BIOSes need to be configure to boot off the network interface,
then you can get a PXE menu built.  You'll login via the serial
console, or iLo2/DRAC to 'interface' with the network boot environment
:)

Go read, there's plenty about all this on the web.
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[Athinaios Politis]

On 20:01 Tue 25 Mar     , Alex Howells wrote:

> On 25/03/2008, chrosken <ordonezivan@...> wrote:
> >
> >  Can someone please give me a hand on this issue.
> >
> >  Thank you.
>
> Next step is to setup DHCP as your boxes need to grab a valid lease;
> their BIOSes need to be configure to boot off the network interface,
> then you can get a PXE menu built.  You'll login via the serial
>
> Go read, there's plenty about all this on the web.

Hello,

This can be useful. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml ,

Panagiotis(pchrist)
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