[Bioclusters] Oscar installation

[chris dagdigian]

The Dell linux-poweredge mailing lists were full of tg3 vs bcm5700 
driver arguments over the Broadcomm chipset issues. I thought the issue 
was resolved before the release of RH 9. Regardless I've not been hands 
on with a 1750 chassis recently.

tg3 worked for some people, bcm worked for others and a whole bunch of 
people decided that the Dell onboard gigE chipset was absolute junk so 
they went out and purchased aftermarket cards from Intel etc.

http://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge/ or google may 
help you with the driver issue.

I'll spare you my cluster-in-a-box and PBS gripes :)

 From a quick glance at the OSCAR docs it looks as though parts of the 
sis/systemimager suite are used to handle the autoinstallation. In 
particular it seems that OSCAR uses the system installation suite (SIS). 
The SIS URL is http://www.sisuite.org

If so than you are in luck because the systemimager autoinstaller 
already has mechanisms in place for downloading and using additional 
kernel modules during the network install process. I suspect that you 
just need to be bringing down the latest and greatest tg3 module. People 
often need this sort of "custom module" functionality to support exotic 
or very new disk controllers and network adapters.

I just had a similar situation with a pure SystemImager setup where we 
needed to autoinstall onto a server node with a 3Ware storage controller 
driving the internal disks. The systemimager 3.x autoinstall kernel that 
comes down via the PXE netboot did not see the drives so it bombed out 
with lots of errors. Teaching systemimager to download and 'insmod' the 
3ware driver was pretty darn easy. Sadly I don't know enough about OSCAR 
to tell you which files and directories control the process.

Your best bet (besides other OSCAR users on this list) will be to dive 
into the OSCAR documentation -- particularly concentrating on the areas 
where it talks about SIS (system installer). There should be 
documentation covering the not-all-that-rare case where people need to 
use custom kernel modules during the autoinstall process to drive their 
specific hardware configuration.

-Chris






Kenneth Geisshirt wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have a client who has bought a brand new cluster - 32x Dell 1750. The 
> master node is running Red Hat 9, but when a node is going to be 
> installed using Oscar 2.3.1 my client gets the following error message:
> 
> ServerWorks CSB5: detected chipset, but driver not compiled in!
> tg3: Problem fetching invariants of chip, aborting.
> 
> Apparently, the problem has something to do with the Broadcom ethernet 
> adaptor.
> 
> Please give me some suggestions to work with.
> 
> Thanks
>   Kneth
> 

-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag@sonsorol.org>
Independent life science IT & informatics consulting
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