ILRI Research Computing

Rocks 5.0 includes a command line tool rocks to handle most system administration tasks.

Nodes' BIOS should be set to boot from PXE (network) first and then the local hard drives. The PXE server changes the PXE configs depending on what bootaction you've set for the node in the rocks database. To instruct a node to reinstall on the next boot:

# rocks set host boot compute-0-6 action="install"
# rocks set host installaction compute-0-6 action="install ilri"
# rocks run host compute-0-6 'reboot'

# rocks set host runaction compute-0-8 action="memtest"
# rocks set host boot compute-0-8 action="os"
# rocks run host compute-0-8 'reboot'

You can monitor a node's progress during the installation using VNC. Make sure you're inside X on the head node, or logged in via SSH with X forwarding:

$ sudo rocks-console compute-0-8