Boot LiveCD USB

These steps provide a bootable USB capable of installing this CSM release.

Topics

  1. Create the Bootable Media
  2. Boot the LiveCD

Create the Bootable Media

Cray Site Init will create the bootable LiveCD. Before creating the media, identify which device will be used for it.

  1. (external) Set up the initial typescript.

    SCRIPT_FILE="$(pwd)/csm-install-usb.$(date +%Y-%m-%d).txt"
script -af "${SCRIPT_FILE}"
export PS1='\u@\H \D{%Y-%m-%d} \t \w # '
export OUT_DIR=$(pwd)/csm-temp

  2. (external#) Identify the USB device.

    NOTE This example shows the USB device is /dev/sdd on the host.

    lsscsi

    Expected output looks similar to the following:

    [6:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      SAMSUNG MZ7LH480 404Q  /dev/sda
[7:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      SAMSUNG MZ7LH480 404Q  /dev/sdb
[8:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      SAMSUNG MZ7LH480 404Q  /dev/sdc
[14:0:0:0]   disk    SanDisk  Extreme SSD      1012  /dev/sdd
[14:0:0:1]   enclosu SanDisk  SES Device       1012  -

    In the above example, internal disks are the ATA devices and USB drives are the final two devices.

    Set a variable with the USB device and for the CSM_PATH:

    USB=/dev/sd<disk_letter>

  3. Format the USB device.

    • Use the CSI application to do this:

      csi pit format "${USB}" "${OUT_DIR}/"pre-install-toolkit-*.iso 50000

    • If CSI is unavailable, then fetch and use the write-livecd.sh script:

      NOTE This assumes the write-livecd.sh script was extracted from the tarball’s cray-site-init RPM. If that was skipped in the USB section of Boot the LiveCD, the script is also available on GitHub:

      curl -f -o "${OUT_DIR}/write-livecd.sh" https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Cray-HPE/cray-site-init/main/scripts/write-livecd.sh && chmod +x "${OUT_DIR}/write-livecd.sh"

      Alternatively if the RPM is available but the LiveCD is being created on a non-RPM based distro, then the script can be extracted from the RPM file:

      bsdtar xvf cray-site-init-*.rpm --include *write-livecd.sh -C "./${OUT_DIR}"
mv -v "${OUT_DIR}/usr/local/bin/write-livecd.sh" ./
rmdir -pv "${OUT_DIR}/usr/local/bin/"

      write-livecd.sh "${USB}" "${OUT_DIR}/"pre-install-toolkit-*.iso 50000

Boot the LiveCD

Some systems will boot the USB device automatically if no other OS exists (bare-metal). Otherwise the administrator may need to use the BIOS Boot Selection menu to choose the USB device.

If an administrator has the node booted with an operating system which will next be rebooting into the LiveCD, then use efibootmgr to set the boot order to be the USB device. See the set boot order page for more information about how to set the boot order to have the USB device first.

NOTE UEFI booting must be enabled in order for the system to find the USB device’s EFI bootloader.

  1. (external#) Confirm that the IPMI credentials work for the BMC by checking the power status.

    Set the BMC variable to the hostname or IP address of the BMC of the PIT node.

    read -s is used in order to prevent the credentials from being displayed on the screen or recorded in the shell history.

    USERNAME=root
BMC=eniac-ncn-m001-mgmt
read -r -s -p "${BMC} ${USERNAME} password: " IPMI_PASSWORD
export IPMI_PASSWORD
ipmitool -I lanplus -U "${USERNAME}" -E -H "${BMC}" chassis power status

  2. (external#) Power the NCN on and connect to the IPMI console.

    NOTE The boot device can be set via IPMI; the example below uses the floppy option. At a glance this seems incorrect, however it selects the primary removable media. This step instructs the user to power off the node to ensure the BIOS has the best chance at finding the USB via a cold boot.

    ipmitool chassis bootdev

       Received a response with unexpected ID 0 vs. 1
   bootdev <device> [clear-cmos=yes|no]
   bootdev <device> [options=help,...]
   none  : Do not change boot device order
   pxe   : Force PXE boot
   disk  : Force boot from default Hard-drive
   safe  : Force boot from default Hard-drive, request Safe Mode
   diag  : Force boot from Diagnostic Partition
   cdrom : Force boot from CD/DVD
   bios  : Force boot into BIOS Setup
   floppy: Force boot from Floppy/primary removable media

    ipmitool -I lanplus -U "${username}" -E -H "${BMC}" chassis bootdev floppy options=efiboot
ipmitool -I lanplus -U "${username}" -E -H "${BMC}" chassis power off

  3. Insert the USB stick into a USB3 port (USB2 is compatible, USB3 offers the best performance).

  4. (external#) Power the server on.

    ipmitool -I lanplus -U "${username}" -E -H "${BMC}" chassis power on
ipmitool -I lanplus -U "${username}" -E -H "${BMC}" sol activate

  5. Do not exit the typescript. After completing this procedure, proceed to First log in.