In my previous posting on the Circumference I said that I wanted to get the eight Raspberry Pi nodes to netboot from the front end processor so I could more easily manage the nodes on which I wanted to install nova-compute. This post provides a very quick update on those explorations.

Newer Pi 3 B have firmware that can allow them to netboot without any SD card in place, but it requires a fair bit of set up. I was struggling to make headway, never seeing bootpc packets from the nodes. Turns out a newer firmware is needed. Andrew Back, from Ground Electronics the company building the Circumference, pointed to a useful cookbook blog post, Network Booting a Raspberry Pi 3 from an Ubuntu Server, that includes pointers to the new firmware.

That got me a bit further. I'm now able to see some nodes, sometimes choosing to send bootpc packets and otherwise talking to the network.

It's not perfect though. In the above video only two hosts are talking to the network. Only some hosts work some of the time. Different ones with each power cycle. More effort and exploration required.

The fun part about this, for me, was that the Circumference made it relatively painless. Like I said in the previous posting, having the hardware there in front of me works better with my brain: When I wanted to see if network activity was happening I looked at the box. When I to power cycle a node, I used the easy command line tools. Looking forward to when I get the OpenStack parts actually working.

Reminder/Disclaimer: Ground Electronics has provided me with a beta Circumference 25 for testing._