Re: password-less public-key authenticated ssh

I am originally from the U.S., and I used to shop at Radio Shack for parts to build guitar pre-amps, etc.

Seeing the frontend scan over a number of IPs is normal, it's looking to see how many compute nodes have connected.

Have you checked that the compute node is set so that network boot is enabled and has precedence over boot from hard disk? You might need to enter BIOS setup to set that, or hitting the F12 key while booting the compute node also works on many machines.