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Creating custom OS images

In order to use an OS other than the one currently supported (Debian Linux kernel 2.6.12), you may do one of the following

• 1) provide your own (frisbee) image of the OS of your choice or
• 2) install the OS of your choice on our nodes from scratch.

For Approach 1)

Here are a few guidelines

• when you create your image, it occupies less than 20gb (make that 15 to be safe).
• your OS image supports the following:
  • a serial console @9600,8,n,1 on the first serial port
  • driver support for 2 Marvell gigabit network card
  • and dhcp on the 2nd wired interface.
• have wireless drivers (Atheros and Intel) support and a set of corresponding utilities installed

After you have an image, simply use

saveNode x,y

to save the image of the node in our repository for further use

For Approach 2)

Our nodes support installation of any OS via network installers.

Please be sure the installer for the OS of your choice provides a serial console on the first serial port @9600,8,n,1 and has network drivers for the Marvell gigabit network cards (I believe they are officially Yukon compatible but I believe Marvell cards are mostly identical).

• The PXE service can be queried from any console at ​http://pxe:5012/pxe/.
• The XML interface is self explanatory.
• Copy your boot script to /tftpboot on repository2 and control the boot behavior of your node via the PXE service.

The PXE service at:

​http://pxe:5012/pxe

will show you all of the available URLs. What you need to use is:

​http://pxe:5012/pxe/nodeSetBootImage?img="image_file_name"&nodes="set-of -nodes"

and:

​http://pxe:5012/pxe/nodeSetClearBootImage?img="image_file_name"&nodes="s et-of-nodes"

You have to come from the grid console to use this. Please let us know if permissions are not working as expected or if you have problems with the service.

To interact with your node, follow the instructions on our FAQ concerning interaction via serial consoles