...the search for intelligent life...

Long ago salvaged, Ironhead was a cluster of six headless nodes with one main node booting from a RAID1 array and the remaining nodes using NFS root off the primary node.

While some of the nodes were used to host random applications, I.E. webservers and game servers, the primary purpose of the cluster was the processing of SETI@home and Folding@Home data.

The rack is custom, welded together from some left over angle iron. The node hardware was off the shelf ATX motherboards and power supplies with a pair of IDE hard drives and a 10/100 ethernet switch.

Fedora Core Linux was used as the host and guest operating systems with the host configured to provide DHCP, TFTP and NFS to support PXE booting the driveless guest nodes while the kernel for the guest nodes was custom compiled with options to support an NFS root file system.