After consulting my professor, we are both in strong agreement that ClusterKnoppix verson 3.6 has some serious inconsistencies that make a lot of stuff not work.

We've traced the IPSec problem down to the fact that theres a .conf file that points to where IPSec should be and where its tools are, yet they are placed in an entirely different folder, specifically the /KNOPPIX folder.

It stands to reason that this kernel issue could very well be. Indeed if you try to boot a Chaos node from this version of the distro from PXE, it will flat out tell you it cannot find the kernel. Again, the .conf file written for pxelinux points do the /diskless directory for it to find the kernel, but it appears to reside somewhere else completely. I'm not a linux pro or else I would have moved the files accordingly.

If anyone else can get their hands on clusterKnoppix 3.6 and take a look at it to verify this for me, I would be greatful. Even though clusterKnoppix is pretty much a dead project, I may be able to find someone interested in at least fixing it. In the future, though, I'll most likely roll my own and add openmosix to it.