The nimbus boot process can be divided broadly into 3 stages. The first stage varies by the type of system while stages two and three are the same for all Nimbus clusters. The stages will be reviewed in order.
Stage 1 begins with power on to the node. In systems with a standard BIOS, stage 1 is a PXE boot. For LinuxBIOS systems, Etherboot is used instead.
- DHCP
PXE boot begins by performing DHCP. The master runs a DHCP server daemon whichwill provide a temporary IP address on the boot net and instructions to load the pxelinux.0 binary boot loader. Please see IETF RFC 2131 for details.