[TriLUG] Read-Write PXE Boot Environment

[Kevin Hunter]

At 7:39p -0400 on Tue, 10 Jun 2008, Alex Kesling wrote wrote:
> In fact I am doing this directly on a LittleFe.  The reason 
> BCCD has been removed from the mix is... well... that it 
> doesn't exactly work very cleanly at times.

Pseudo for the list/you:

Yeah, that's been our experience while porting it to LittleFe as well.
The BCCD (Bootable Cluster CD) is a project by Paul Gray, that was meant
to be a drop-in harmless/temporary replacement for Windows labs.  HPC
(High Performance Computing) though still a smallish sector, was much
smaller when he began the project, and he needed a way to use resources
he didn't have to teach HPC.  The BCCD is his answer, and for it's
purpose, it's an *excellent* tool.

LittleFe* (a 6-node Beowulf-style portable cluster) is for affordable
HPC education, and as such it seemed a natural progression for the BCCD:
LittleFe is the hardware, BCCD is the software.  Unfortunately, a lot of
the assumptions and decisions for the BCCD were geared toward stand
alone, independent operation in the whole, which for engineering and
cost reasons, are not necessarily traits of LittleFe.

You might be interested to know that we're actively working on the next
generation of the BCCD for use with LittleFe (BCCD-NG).  It is Debian
based, and resolves a lot of these issues.

> Trying to change 
> anything and get new things working on BCCD has been such a 
> hassle that we've decided to get Fedora functioning happily 
> instead.

Hmm, we... Shodor?  Bob Panoff?  We've probably already met off list
then?  We should talk, eh?

Kevin

* Kudos if you've already gotten the play on words.