[27090] in Athena Bugs
Re: Installing Athena in the S&P Cluster
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (andrew m. boardman)
Fri Jun 1 13:22:04 2007
Message-Id: <200706011721.l51HLhEW018338@pothole.mit.edu>
To: sp-it-chair@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 31 May 2007 21:45:45 EDT."
<465F7A49.4080004@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2007 13:21:43 -0400
From: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@mit.edu>
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Cc: Christophe Mandy <newtoni@mit.edu>, bugs@mit.edu
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
> Do you have any pointers for us on how to:
>
> 1. Make it search the cdrom since virtually no one has a floppy anymore
> 2. Build a cd that may contain the new drivers?
Unfortunately, none of this is likely to be easy, and you're likely to
run into some other problems as well. The issues are, roughly:
1) The CD already contains a full driver set for the install kernel. The
real problem is that both the kernel and drivers are relatively
ancient, and the network hardware on the Dimension 9200 is fairly new.
2) Even if you could do an install, the current Athena release also won't
support your hardware, since we're still using a kernel that's almost
a year old due to some bugs in newer Red Hat kernels that cause many
cluster machines to lock up.
There should be a patch release out within a few weeks that will fix
problem #2. There should be a shiny new Athena installer out sometime
next month that will fix problem #1. So, the easy but
not-immediately-helpful answer is "wait about 1.5 months, maybe a bit
sooner, and it will all just work".
Unless you've got some *really* bored linux kernel hackers around, you
probably don't want to try and backport 82566DC support to the current
installer kernel. There are various options (all experimental and
unsupported to varying degrees) for installing other linux distributions
and adding athena services to your systems; that will certainly add some
administrative overhead and will require more work, but could give you
something useful sooner.
Sorry to not be the bearer of better news; if you want further info on
any of the above feel free to ask.
Andrew Boardman/ZINC/ISDA/IS&T/MIT +1.617.253.4040 amb@mit.edu
