Setting up your Switch

Setting up your power controller

Setting up your serial server

Setting up the MFS for testbed nodes

These filesystems are PXE booted over the network via TFTP and allow us to perform various parts of node maintenance.

There are three different MFS (memory file system) images that come with DETER/Emulab.

They are:

• The Admin MFS
  • Primarily used to create new operating system images using imagezip and ssh
• The New Node MFS
  • This is the default image for nodes not explicitly listed in dhcpd.conf.
  • Has scripts to try to identify what type of node is being booted based on node_type variables.
• The Frisbee MFS
  • This image is used when loading an operating system image onto

The reason all these tasks are split up among multiple images is to keep the image size down since they are booted over the network. With faster networks, these images will likely be rolled into a single Linux based image in the future.