The previous post ended with “I have no idea why the nodes won’t boot.” Now we know. The problem is that, in terms of the mkchroot-rh script that Warewulf3 comes with, Fedora 16 is not a Redhat derivative. This makes some sense, since the init system in Fedora16 is all kinds of fucked up, consisting of a self-interfering mixture of SysV Init, chkconfig (cloned from Irix) and systemctl.
Moral of the story: don’t use Fedora. It looks like the software that suggested Fedora works better on CentOS anyway.
