I'm using a linux cluster at college to run parallel programs using LAM/MPI. The cluster consists of 4 linux machines. LAM is basically a daemon based implementation of MPI. What it does is...when you boot up the nodes via the command 'lamboot -v hostfile' it launches daemons on each of the machines who's IPs are listed in the hostfile. Once the nodes are up and running you can run any parallel program using MPI i.e The Message Passing Interface. Now i wanted to see if i could in some way have the cluster effect on a single linux machine. So on my laptop i tried bringing up 4 virtual interfaces on top of the actual ethernet interface eth0 using the following command:

ifconfig eth0: x IP netmask 255.0.0.0 up

I executed this command 4 times using 1, 2, 3 and 4 in place of x and in place of IP i wrote down 4 Class C addresses...i.e 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, 10.0.0.3 and 10.0.0.4.

The command executed 4 times perfectly fine. But when i did a lamboot, first of all it wouldn't let me run it logged in as root saying it's a very bad practice to run daemons as root. Then i logged in as myself and not root, only the first node booted up and none of the rest....the boot process failed!!!

If anyone knows anything about creating a multihomed host (i.e giving one machine multiple ips) plzzzzzzzzzz let me know!!!!!!!!!!!