Using a 3c990 with FAI

[Jens Ruehmkorf]

Hello Xavier!

> I'm about to install a 20 nodes cluster, I want to use FAI but the
> NICs we have (3c990) have his own driver supplied by 3com as a module.
> Is it possible to mount a remote root filesystem with a modular
> driver?

Technically there should be no problem to achieve your goal.

You simply boot a kernel together with an initrd. Within that initial
ramdisk image you simply modprobe your_nic.o and do a change root to your
nfs-root (depending on booting from kernel 2.2 or 2.4 the methods differ
substantially). You may find some further descriptions in an earlier email
I sent [0].

You still have to think on distributing your boot-kernel to your cluster
clients. That may either be done through a floppy/cdrom. But I suppose you
have one of the newer 3Com cards that have a MBA-Bootprom onboard. Choose
PXE as bootmethod and use pxelinux [1] by HPA. PXE has some non-standard
requirements for tftp, so you have to use tftpd-hpa as server (available
since woody).

To get a detailed description of how setting up your initrd works, have a
look at nais [2], especially at the scripts provided there. FAI doesn't
use an initrd (because of memory limitations I suppose).

> Or I will have to use another card for installation and then change
> it?

No, you definitely don't want to do that ;)

Kind regards,
Jens

[0] http://www.uni-koeln.de/bin2/maillist/linux-fai/1010904.033615/156124
[1] http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php
[2] http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/nais