Setup ACT Breakin hardware diagnostics tool as a grub boot option

Breakin is Advanced Clustering Technologies stress-test and hardware diagnostics tool. It is extremely useful for detecting errors on your system while stress testing the hardware at the same time in order to create a more realistic test environment.

This guide is best used for head nodes and workstations that do not have a built in method to load Breakin.

Compute nodes are able to boot to Breakin by using the act_netboot utility from your head node.

Note: These steps were performed on a CentOS 6.3 system.

Once the bootimage tarball has been placed on your server:

$ tar xfj bootimage-3.71.tbz2
$ cd bootimage-3.71
$ ls
examples  initrd-3.71.cpio.lzma  kernel-3.71  README
$ cp initrd-3.71.cpio.lzma /boot
$ cp kernel-3.71 /boot
$ vi /boot/grub/grub.conf


Place the following at the bottom of your grub.conf file:

title Breakin (3.71)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-3.71 sshpasswd=breakin startup=breakin vga=2
initrd /initrd-3.71.cpio.lzma

root (hd0,0) – hd0,0 will be the default location for the boot partition on all ACT servers, unless requested otherwise. You can easily tell the correct location by looking at the ‘root’ configuration line under your default boot option.

The user name for login will always be ‘ssh’

sshpasswd=breakin – you can change the password to your own preference.

Now reboot the server to see that Breakin is a boot option on the grub boot menu.