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chrosken wrote:
| We have a clusters of machine and would like to setup network booting. At
| this time, we have to go to the data center and boot the machine manually.
| We would like to manage it as best as we could where we can save time and
| money. I heard network booting is a good way to go. I'm not sure how does
| network booting work, and also not sure if this is possible with Gentoo
| operating system. Sorry for the dumb questions, I am totally new to
| Networking.
|
| Can someone please point me to the right direction?
|
| Any help is appreciated.
|

You want to take a look at:

pxebooting
grub + netbooting

I remember seeing a demo from yamin at a gentoo UK conference demoing
netbooting with a genkernel kernel

Additionally ipmi would be interesting. ipmi is a standard for remote
management bioses, many of them are network enabled. At least all dell
servers have them, Sun hardware has something similar (they invented the
ipmi standard IIRC) and HP hardware... wel you get the picture.

Most of these BMC-chips allow for remote network control of bios
settings including power. They are reachable as soon as the server is
connected to a powersupply (doesn't have to be on)

We've build a system of catalyst, pxe+grub-netbooting + agaffneys
quick-install + puppet that uses pxe to start bare-metal servers and
bring up to production config in 45 minutes. We're busy enhancing that
with ipmi so we never need to go into the datacenter if we hire someone
to rack the servers.

All servers have a grub config which defaults to normal HD-based booting
but also have an option to netboot and possible re-install.

So, it's very possible with Gentoo :-)

Regards,

Ramon van Alteren

Senior System Administrator Hyves.nl
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