Remember, you are going to be building a custom kernel (at least one, probably two or three, and perhaps several) to support mosix anyway, so at this point your primary concern should be to make sure the necessary hardware is supported in your configuration to allow the machine to boot and load the hardware interface from which you will be installing packages, either the network or the CD drive. From a practical standpoint, install the drivers required to create an environment in which you will be comfortable working. What this means in practical terms is that you probably need to worry about including support for your network card and any SCSI adapters on which your disk subsystem depends. It is important to remember to include support here for both network adapters that are installed in the the machine that is going to be used as the cluster controller. This is by far the easiest way to create the full environment that is required to support two cards, and the files that are part of that environment are key to smooth upgrades of the kernel and of the package distribution. Trust me on this one, I speak from bitter experience (grin). I've also found that PCI cards are best loaded as modules, but that I prefer to build support for ISA cards directly into the kernel.

When I made the initial installation on the machines that are part of Ralphzilla, I was concerned about easing access to the machines that are part of the cluster, because I knew they would be accessible only through Ralphzilla in their final configuration. Toward that end I installed support for NFS servers and clients, as well as smbfs, the file system for the Samba package that facilitates the incorporation of unix/linux machines into Windows networking networks. In retrospect I could have gotten by with just smbfs, which I personally consider to be somewhat more reliable than NFS. Realistically I could have gotten by without that as well, because I moved quite a few files around with ftp, but it was nice to have. Indeed, Samba can be configured to support a number of services for Windows networks, such as printer sharing and DHCP and WINS servers, that would be prime candidates for inclusion in the cluster where circumstances warrant it. You can find smbfs under File Systems/Network File Systems. I would also suggest that you build in support for the DOS and/or VFAT file systems. Without it, you are not going to be able to mount diskettes formatted on a Windows machine. You personally may cringe at the thought, but I've had a couple of circumstances in which the ability to do just that was of substantial benefit. (The corollary to that statement is that I've also had circumstances in which I didn't build in that support, which is why I suggest remembering to do it.)

After configuring device drivers, the first choice offered by the menu will be to configure the network, which will involve assigning the system its name, and specifying network addresses, gateways, name servers, and the domain of which the system will be a part. By now, you are probably familiar with my personal penchant for assigning whimsical names to machines. You can adopt whatever strategy you like, but remember that you'll have an easier time remembering which machine is which in the cluster if you give them descriptive names. While virtually everything you would specify here would be irrelevant once the machine is in the cluster, if you are installing from the network you should just go ahead and assign valid values for your specific network here. We'll change them to values appropriate for the cluster later. I promise. If you are installing from CD, you should assign a coherent address and subnet mask combination for any machine in the cluster, and of course an address valid both for the cluster network and one for the "public" network to two network interfaces for the cluster controller. A more detailed example will follow as we discuss mosix configuration.

You will now be given the opportunity to make the system bootable for the hard drive, or to create a boot diskette. I would suggest making the system bootable from the hard drive, and creating at least one boot diskette, and one for any machine with an unusual configuration. It's not difficult to customize a boot diskette to reflect most unusual circumstances, but if you need that diskette that last thing you'll want to do is figure out how to do that then.

The final configuration item you will need to set is what debian terms Configure System. All this involves is selecting your local time zone and determining whether you want your system to operate using that time or Greenwich Mean Time. Either selection is fine from the standpoint of Mosix
Next - Initial Potato Configuration