Hints for Making New OS Images

First, 40% of our nodes are physically located 400 miles away from the boss and users servers. Please, never try to create an image from a node located in Berkeley instead of one located at ISI. The ones located at Berkeley and their types all begin with the letter b, eg bpc183 for a node, bpc2133 for a type.

Secondly, after you have created an image, try loading it back and watching what happens through the serial port.

Consider creating a two node experiment, one to create the image and the other to load it back.

There is a command called "os_load" available on the users server:

 users% which os_load
 /usr/testbed/bin/os_load
 users% os_load -h
 option -h not recognized
 os_load [options] node [node ...]
 os_load [options] -e pid,eid
 where:
     -i    - Specify image name; otherwise load default image
     -p    - Specify project for finding image name (-i)
     -s    - Do *not* wait for nodes to finish reloading
     -m    - Specify internal image id (instead of -i and -p)
     -r    - Do *not* reboot nodes; do that yourself
     -e    - Reboot all nodes in an experiment
   node    - Node to reboot (pcXXX)

while the second node is reloading, watch its progress in real time using the console command from the users server, ie

users% console pc193

A third general suggestion is that if you think you've got a good image, but it flounders while coming up , you can create another experiment with an ns directive that says "Even if you think the node has not booted, let my experiment swap in anyway;" then you may be able to log in through the console and figure out what went wrong. An example of this is:

tb-set-node-failure-action $nodeA "nonfatal"

A fourth suggestion is to create whole disk images on a smaller machine rather than a single partition image.