During this phase, you will complete steps 1 through 6 of the OSCAR wizard in defining your cluster. If you encounter problems or wish to redo any of the SIS actions performed in the wizard steps 2 or 3, please refer to the SIS(1) man pages.
Begin the installation process by pressing the Step 1 button of the
wizard entitled Prepare OSCAR Server for Install
.
Here you will select the default MPI implementation for use on the cluster. Note that all available MPI implementations will be available for general use; this step simply picks which one will be the system default.
This step also installs and starts other necessary software, devices, and services on the server.
Press the Step 2 button of the wizard entitled Build OSCAR
Client Image
. A dialog will be displayed. In most cases, the
defaults will be sufficient. You should verify that the disk partition
file is the proper type for your client nodes. The sample files have
the disk type as the last part of the filename. You may also want to
change the post installation action and the IP assignment methods.
It is important to note that if you wish to use automatic reboot,
you should make sure the BIOS on each client is set to boot from the
local hard drive before attempting a network boot by default. If you
have to change the boot order to do a network boot before a disk
boot to install your client machines, you should not use automatic
reboot.
Building the image may take several minutes; the red progress bar on the bottom of the window will indicate how far along the process is.
There is a lot of output in the console window during the build. It is normal to see some warning messages in the console. You can safely ignore these messages and wait for the final popup window announcing the success or failure of the overall image build.
A sample dialog is shown in Figure 2.
The defaults of this panel use the sample disk partition and RPM package files that can be found in the oscarsamples directory. You may want to customize these files to make the image suit your particular requirements.
The disk partition file contains a line for each partition desired, where each line is in the following format:
<partition> <size in megabytes> <type> <mount point> <options>
Here is a sample (for a SCSI disk):
/dev/sda1 24 ext2 /boot defaults /dev/sda5 128 swap /dev/sda6 1000 ext2 / defaults nfs_oscar:/home - nfs /home rw
The last partition specified will grow to fill the entire disk. You can create your own partition files, but make sure that you do not exceed the physical capacity of your client hardware. Also be careful to not specify duplicate filesystems as this will cause problems during the installation. The sample listed above, and some others, are in the oscarsamples directory.
The package list is simply a list of RPM file names (one per line). Be sure to include all prerequisites that any packages you might add. You do not need to specify the version, architecture, or extension of the RPM filename. For example, bash-2.05-8.i386.rpm need only be listed as ``bash''.
If you want to use a customized kernel, you can add it to the image
after it is built (after step 1, but before step 2). See the
kernel_picker application description in
Section 8.3 on
page .
Once you are satisfied with the input, click the Build Image
button. When the image completes, a popup window will appear
indicating whether the build succeeded or failed. If successful,
click the
Ok
button, and you will be returned to the main
OSCAR wizard menu.
If the build fails, look through the console output6 for some indication as to what happened to
cause the failure. Common causes include: prerequisite failure, ran
out of disk space, and missing package files. Also see the Release
Notes for this version of OSCAR in Section 3
(page ).
Press the Step 3 button of the wizard entitled Define OSCAR
Clients
. In the dialog box that is displayed, enter the appropriate
information. Again the defaults will be correct in most cases. At a
minimum, you will need to enter a value in the Number of Hosts
to specifies how many clients you want to create.
When finished entering information, press the Addclients
button.
A sample dialog is shown in Figure 3.
After the clients are created, a dialog will pop up with the
completion status. After closing that, you may press the
Close
button in the build clients dialoge and continue with
the next step.
The MAC address of a client is a twelve hex-digit hardware address embedded in the client's ethernet adapter. For example, `` 00:0A:CC:01:02:03'', as opposed to the familiar format of IP addresses. These MAC addresses uniquely identify client machines on a network before they are assigned IP addresses. DHCP uses the MAC address to assign IP addresses to the clients.
In order to collect the MAC addresses, press the Step 4 button of the
wizard entitled Setup Networking
. The OSCAR network utility
dialog box will be displayed. To use this tool, you will need to know
how to network boot your client nodes. For instructions on doing so,
see Appendix A. A sample dialog is shown
in Figure 4.
To start the collection, press the Collect MAC Address
button
and then network boot the first client. As the clients boot up, their
MAC addresses will show up in the left hand window. Select a MAC
address and the appropriate client in the right side window. Click
Assign MAC to Node
to associate that MAC address with that
node. If you would like to make specific nodes associated with
specific client definitions, you should boot them one at a time. If
you do not care which node gets associated with which client, you may
boot them all at once and randomly assign the MAC addresses.
When you have collected all of the MAC addresses, click the
Stop Collecting
button and then click the
Configure
DHCP Server
button to configure the DHCP server.
You may also configure your remote boot method from this panel. The
Build Autoinstall Floppy
button will build a boot floppy for
client nodes that do not support PXE booting. The
Setup
Network Boot
button will configure the server to answer PXE boot
requests if your client hardware supports it. See
Appendix A for more details.
When you have collected the addresses for all your client nodes and
completed the networks setup, press the Close
button.
root 2002-11-08