AMD Catalyst diskless cluster

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 13.10 to set up a diskless compute cluster. When I use the procedure detailed in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DisklessUbuntuHowto, I successfully am able to boot all four nodes. However, once I install Catalyst, I immediately have problems: only one diskless node boots properly, with the other two hanging while attempting to start X. My assumption is that my Catalyst build was somehow specific to the node which I booted from first, which somehow prevents the other nodes from loading Catalyst.

Can anyone provide hints to help solve this? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Nevermind, figured it out. The big problem was that simultaneous read/writes to certain parts of the NFS share hosting the childnode root were creating race conditions, which are avoidable if you use an aufs-type overlay filesystem. By following this guide (http://adminotes.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-to-setup-diskless-ubuntu-1204-with.html), I was able to figure out the required syntax and scripts for setting up aufs on the child nodes. Now that I have this successfully working, each node loads Catalyst and X properly on boot.