naked machines

[Terry Gliedt]

massimiliano cialdi wrote:
> is it possible to run acluster in which some machines are "naked"?
> I mean a computer with only mother board (with an integrated NIC to
> boot up), cpu and ram; without any mass storage device (such hard
> disk, floppy or CD), keyboard, mouse and graphic card.

There are two issues here.

(1) Can you get the machine BIOS to boot at all. Most BIOSes do not 
require a keyboard or storage devices, but I'd expect most will want a 
graphic card, memory and CPU.

(2) If you can get the BIOS to boot, then can you get a Linux kernel to 
run? The answer to this is most certainly. You can do a PXE or other 
network boot and go from there. You'll have to use a ramdisk or NFS 
mount the filesystem from another system.

I asked about running diskless clients on the OpenMosix mailing list and 
one person told me:

I did get a cluster running with one "master" and 14 "clients" via the 
Linux Terminal Server Project:  http://www.ltsp.org

Another guy pointed me do http://www.purehacking.com/chaos/

In any case I had enough people respond to know that one CAN run 
diskless. The devil is in the details, of course.

-- 
=============================================================
Terry Gliedt     tpg at umich.edu       http://www.hps.com/~tpg/
Biostatistics, Univ of Michigan  Personal Email:  tpg at hps.com