Home server undertaking, NFS, PXE boot, 6 servers

imagoose · 2012-06-22 15:48:56

Hey all, I have few old servers I like to play around with, and a main home server. My main one, which is a supermicro tower with 7 36 gb scsi320 drives, dual dual-core xeons. I have 5 poweredge 2600's that aren't in use due to my limitation of networking equipment, but I want to set up an NFS with pxe boot daisy chaining the poweredges to my supermicro. is this possible, and any advice?
i'm reading https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Di … t_NFS_root and trying one tonight.

fukawi2 · 2012-06-23 01:17:31

imagoose wrote:

....daisy chaining the poweredges to my supermicro. is this possible, and any advice?

You mean each PowerEdge has dual port NIC cards, and you want to daisy chain each server to the next server instead of using a switch? Interesting...

You should be able to, but you'll have to boot each server in order, and once the system is booted, setup a bridge between the 2 NIC's so the next server can boot. You're likely to experience diminishing performance as you get to the end of the chain.

My advice would be to grab yourself a cheap 8-port switch.

nomorewindows · 2012-06-23 16:24:26

I think you need to have a subnetting system worked out, having a network of more networks and less hosts. So that you can "route" between each machine on either side of the network, effectively making a token ethernet. But then it's going to get confusing if you actually try to complete the circle. You could use iptables on each machine, one NIC would have a fixed address, serving dhcp to the PXE client machine. So when you boot up a new PXE client, have it boot from the original server, maybe a copy of the same kernel in the /var/tftpboot directory on the main server and in the PXE client's same directory, but the root filesystem still accessed from the main server across the iptables and subnet. Using pxelinux.cfg rules, you could have it set, to boot (possibly in fixed order) downline with the different configurations to get them to work. I think you will be troubleshooting network bottlenecks, because no matter how you do it, it will eventually all go back to the main server. Any errors in implementation will of course propogate across the network and cause problems.

Ditto, just get a hand-me-down switch from somewhere.

Last edited by nomorewindows (2012-06-23 16:35:33)

fukawi2 · 2012-06-24 23:02:50

nomorewindows wrote:

I think you need to have a subnetting system worked out, having a network of more networks and less hosts. So that you can "route" between each machine on either side of the network, effectively making a token ethernet.

Bridging is going to be much simpler than routing 4 subnets... You'll be connecting the machines at Layer 2 instead of Layer 3. But either way is going to be overly complex compared to picking up a $20 hub/switch (Connecting them at Layer 1).

nomorewindows wrote:

Ditto, just get a hand-me-down switch from somewhere.

At least we agree on something

Arch Linux

#1 2012-06-22 15:48:56

Home server undertaking, NFS, PXE boot, 6 servers

#2 2012-06-23 01:17:31

Re: Home server undertaking, NFS, PXE boot, 6 servers

#3 2012-06-23 16:24:26

Re: Home server undertaking, NFS, PXE boot, 6 servers

#4 2012-06-24 23:02:50

Re: Home server undertaking, NFS, PXE boot, 6 servers

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