Building A Diskless Folding @ Home Farm

Project: Folding @ Home
Date Written: November 25, 2002
Written By: Jason Rabel

Configuration Files:

Just a note before we get into the custom configuration part, on the last page I will put up all the config files listed in this how-to in a compressed file for download. However I highly suggest reading through everything here completely so that you can get a better understanding of how everything works.

Now it's time to get down to the nitty gritty and configure the files. The first file is the dhcpd.conf file, which tells all the clients what file to load and what their network settings are. The DNS server I use is my broadband router's IP address, yours may vary. I also put in a subnet range of .101 - .200 which gives me room for more than enough folding machines, you can adjust to bigger if you really need it (the thought of that many farms running in my house makes me think of the fire department).

Each client machine gets a hostname of "ws00x" where "x" gets incremented for each new machine, this is done mostly for simplicity, as we go into the other configuration files you will understand better why it is done like this. The main thing you will need change is under each host ws00x you will need to find out each clients MAC address to enter. The filename you won't need to adjust, but make sure the "vmlinuz-2.4.19-ltsp-1" file exists in the /tftpboot/lts directory. The PXE booting is a little different, the necessary files are in that separate GZip file mentioned before, along with instructions on where to put each file and the configuration differences (which are for the most part like below).

Here's a picture of the back of one of my NICs as an example. The MAC address of the NIC below is 00:10:B5:C0:C2:F6.

Don't worry about the farm's dhcp server interfering with your broadband router's dhcp server. Because you are only specifying the network that is on eth1 (the folding farm), it doesn't listen for or respond to dhcp requests on eth0 (your existing home network). This is nice because you can add on the farm without having to change anything on your existing network.

/etc/dhcpd.conf

The hosts file you will need to enter the IP & hostname of the server & each client machine, otherwise you could run into errors.

/etc/hosts