LiveCD Virtual ISO Boot

This page will walk-through booting the LiveCD .iso file directly onto a BMC.

Requirements

A Cray Pre-Install Toolkit ISO is required for this process. This ISO can be obtained from:

  • The Cray Pre-Install Toolkit ISO included in a CSM release tar file.
  • Internal endpoints (HPE Artifactory)

BMCs’ Virtual Mounts

Most BMCs offer a Web Interface for controlling the node and for providing access to its BIOS and firmware.

Refer to the following pages based on your node vendor for help mounting an ISO image:

HPE iLO BMCs

iLO BMCs allow for booting directly from an HTTP-accessible ISO location.

Enter the Virtual Media URL, select Boot on Next Reset, and click Insert Media.

iLO BMC Mount

Next reboot by selecting Reset in the top right power menu.

iLO BMC Reboot

Open the virtual terminal by choosing the HTML5 Console option when clicking the terminal image in the bottom left corner.

NOTE It may appear that the boot is stalled at a line of EXT4-fs (loop1): mounted ... or Starting dracut pre-mount hook.... This is the step when it actually begins downloading the ISO’s squashfs root filesystem and can take a few minutes

Gigabyte BMCs

Gigabyte BMCs allow for booting over NFS or HTTP.

Go to the BMC settings and setup the remote ISO for your protocol and node.

Gigabyte BMC Virtual Media Settings

Web Interface

Access your BMC’s web interface and navigate to Settings -> Media Redirection Settings -> General Settings.

Enable Remote Media Support and Mount CD/DVD and then fill in the server IP or DNS name and the path to the server.

Gigabyte BMC Settings

NOTE The Gigabyte URL appears to not allow certain characters and has a limit on path length. You may need to move or rename the ISO to a location with a smaller file name.

Next navigate to Image Redirection -> Remote Images and click on the Start button to start the Virtual ISO mount.

Gigabyte BMC Start

Finally, reboot the node and select the Virtual CDROM option from the manual boot options.

Gigabyte BMC Boot

Intel BMCs

Intel BMCs allow for booting with direct ISO mounts.

Go to the Virtual Media menu.

Intel BMC Virtual Media

Choose your ISO file:

Intel BMC Virtual Mount

Click mount to make it available.

Intel BMC Virtual Mounted

NOTE Do not close the Virtual Media window or the main BMC page until done.

Configuring

After attaching and booting into the ISO, the password will need to be changed before using the booted OS.

  1. The ISO boots with no password, requiring one to be set on first login. Enter blank as the password and follow the prompts.
  2. You can now use the LiveCD to look around, or continue preparing for a CSM installation.

NOTE The root OS / directory is writable without persistence. This means that restarting the machine will result in all changes being lost. Before restarting, consider following Backing up the Overlay COW FS and the accompanying Restoring from an Overlay COW FS Backup section.

Backing up the Overlay COW FS

You can backup the writable overlay upper-dir so that your changes are not lost after a reboot or when updating your ISO.

This requires that you have a location to which you can scp a tar file as a backup.

tar czf /run/overlay.tar.gz -C /run/overlayfs/rw .
scp /run/overlay.tar.gz <somelocation>

NOTE If you want to reduce the size of the backup you can also delete any squashfs files first, or exclude them in the tar command using --exclude='*.squashfs'. You will then need to re-populate those after you restore your backup

Restoring from an Overlay COW FS Backup

Restore a backed up tar file from the previous command with

scp <somelocation> /run/overlay.tar.gz
tar xf /run/overlay.tar.gz -C /run/overlayfs/rw
mount -o remount /

If you excluded the squashfs files from the backup you will also need to repopulate them following the configuration section.