Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 23:06:59 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu> To: Stefan Molnar <stefan@csudsu.com> Cc: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>, Jung-uk Kim <juikim@engin.umd.umich.edu>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0006152300150.12294-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0006151526070.268-100000@clockwork.csudsu.com>
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On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Stefan Molnar wrote: > I have not built clusters over 200 nodes, but I almost never > go into the BIOS for configurations. And the systems that > I have used, include serial access within the BIOS. And > adding PXE roms will make things nicer on the install front. > But my current system is a single floppy, and that works > well. As someone who has built one of these large systems, the best thing we could want is OpenFirmware with a ROM monitor and Lights-Out Monitoring. Basically make a PC act like a Sun Netra T1. :) In real life, the only BIOS problems that require human intervention are usually hardware related. You can't avoid the trip to the colo in this case. The buildout cost is pretty spendy too, having to buy a Cisco 2511 or similiar term server for every 24-odd boxen. For us, this would mean buying 20 or so units and cabling up every box, which we don't have the time to do. We just leave 9" mono VGA displays and keyboards in the cage and call up the remote-hands when things die. We let them power cycle things but if it's really hosed we drive over and frob the box ourselves. BTW the PXE loader stuff is invaluable for installs. Saves having to track down a (usually broken) floppy to load a system up. A few keypresses at boot and voila, new FreeBSD box. :) I will probably give a talk at BSDCon about these issues, if I can get everything lined up. > The best people to determin if it is nessesary is Yahoo and Hotmail. > Since they have worked with these issues in the thousands of machines. Sigh, it's not easy being #6. Even with 16 million confirmed members eGroups gets no respect :) Doug White | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | www.FreeBSD.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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