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There used to be a tool called, IIRC, "firebreather" that was a multicast image broadcaster for booting clusters of systems. I did a search and couldn't find a
by linsomniac 4y ago
There used to be a tool called, IIRC, "firebreather" that was a multicast image broadcaster for booting clusters of systems. I did a search and couldn't find any reference to it now. An associate used it to boot hundreds or thousands of systems back in the early 2000s, it would take a minute or two.
Basically: The systems would PXE boot the bootloader (or maybe it was burned locally to the boot ROM or similar, I don't recall). Then firebreather would spray the kernels and associated boot data over multicast to all the machines at once. Any that were lagging behind or missed packets, would catch them the next time around, firebreather would spray the images a few times or something.
- latchkey 4y agoThat's really cool. Luckily, our datacenters where these machines are all Tier 3, so the full reboot doesn't happen very often. We've only had to shut down a lot of racks once for some power management issues. It was a bit of a struggle, but things eventually booted. The bigger issue that we faced was that dnsmasq couldn't keep up with all the UDP packets and we had to switch to Kea kind of mid-flight, which was a bit of work since it was a weekend (of course things fail on friday night) and restarting everything to get new leases (and a few with duplicate IPs) was a bit of nail biting. It all sorted itself out though and we haven't had any more issues on that front.
- HeckFeck 4y agoThat sounds a bit like UDP multicast. One of those tragically under used features of the networking stack. Ripe for abuse were it exposed on the open Internet certainly, but still very cool.
- linsomniac 4y agoYes, it was indeed built on UDP multicast.