Diskless Farm Assistance

[rh77]

Hi all-

I've been Folding since '03 and joined Team 32 a year or two ago. I have laptops as the more powerful daily operators, and a Farm of various boxes in the basement.

I take-in old machines and devote them to folding.

The problem is checking the status of about 6 different systems running various Linux OS.

The goal:

The unattended farm has 5 desktops and a laptop with a failing screen. I'm running out of good HDDs and the ability to maintain them is difficult (only 2 monitors available make it time consuming). If the power fails, it takes a while to get them going again.

I've been putting off the task of moving the farm to "dumb terminal" status -- diskless.

Is there a recommended program and process these days for such a farm? One Linux box can handle multiple NICs and vid cards, etc. I've searched and only found old info.

I need a bit of assistance -- uncharted territory for me here...

Thanks for any help...

RH77

[ihrsetrdr]

I've never gone diskless myself, but here's a link that might help:

http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/linux.html

[Sleepy_Steve]

If they are all single core.... Notfred's supports diskless folding as I recall.

I think it may have added support for SMP as well these days, but I've not checked on it in a long time. If you go diskless you're at least pruning down to one or two flavors of linux to run it all in.

Personally I'd probably have either a KVM or PXE boot everything. Oh, and I'd at least have a UPS for the main (not dumb node), and maybe for all nodes so that you can keep it more of a hands off operation for the things sitting in your basement.

[Jolly-Swagman]

I've never gone diskless myself, but here's a link that might help:

http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/linux.html

The link above that ihrsetrdr linked too is what I have been using too easy to set up and you can use USB flash drive to back Wu data too.

[harlam357]

I'm no diskless expert either... but notfred has some really well put together stuff. Just follow his guide... there are a few people here that run fully diskless. Here's a couple threads on it.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=436219

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=550287