06. Operating System

Chapter focus: Opening of Part 2, L2 — turning bare metal into a "homogeneous, reproducible, rollback-able" OS environment: PXE autoinstall, diskless boot, Golden Image pipelines, system networking and boot troubleshooting.

🧭 Reading Map

• Prerequisites: 05. Storage Systems — storage and OS provisioning ship in the same delivery batch; understand the data plane first
• Role: opening of Part 2, L2 — turning bare metal into a "homogeneous, reproducible, rollback-able" OS environment: PXE autoinstall, diskless boot, Golden Image pipelines, system networking (NAT) and boot troubleshooting
• Order: provisioning pipeline & image pipeline (big picture) first, then PXE troubleshooting and system networking
• Next: 07. Scheduling & Cloud — once machines are up, who decides which GPU goes to whom

Articles

Cluster Delivery Automation: From PXE Provisioning + Ansible Config to Slurm-Ready

Reproducible flow and scripts dissecting cluster delivery: node acceptance after PXE, Ansible batch config (network/storage/drivers), Slurm readiness checks, with a delivery checklist and engineering takeaways.

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Incident Review: How LD_LIBRARY_PATH Broke dracut and XFS Mount

A GPU/HPC server failed to boot with the error: mount: unknown filesystem type ''xfs''. The root cause was not disk failure, but environment variable po

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Diskless Linux Boot via PXE + NFS (Ubuntu / Rocky / Red Hat)

In data centers, cluster environments, educational labs, or large-scale node deployments, Diskless Boot is a common and efficient way to start systems

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Ubuntu 22.04/20.04 Automated Provisioning: Cloud-init & Subiquity

A complete guide to automated bare-metal provisioning for Ubuntu Server using Subiquity, Cloud-init (Autoinstall), and dual-mode UEFI/Legacy boot.

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PXE Troubleshooting Handbook for Large-Scale Provisioning

six classic failures: symptom, root cause, fix, and a decision tree.

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Large-Scale Provisioning Pipeline: Golden Image, Version Management & Canary Rollout

reproducible builds, versioning, canary strategy.

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Linux Dual-NIC NAT Gateway Guide

At the OS level, configure a dual-NIC Linux node as a NAT gateway so internal nodes share public access; covers iptables, Firewalld and nftables.

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nvitop: An Easier GPU Monitoring & Process Management Alternative to nvidia-smi

Interactive NVIDIA-GPU process viewer and one-stop GPU process management: colorized TUI, history graphs, process sorting/filtering and keystroke process management — installation, basic usage, key bindings and cluster troubleshooting.

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