Progress on getting a good system running on the 32Mb machines we've been given is going well. At some point over the summer holidays, we are going to need to install a working system on 123 machines. The machines all have 'blank' hard drives, a floppy drive and onboard realtek ethernet NIC. I cannot guarantee that all the hard drives are identical, although they are all about 3Gb. The final setup on the machines will be basically Suse 7.2 with some tweaks - I guess a lightweight kernel and, it currently looks like a hacked version of icewm with all 'toys' removed. All machines will be identical apart from IP address (fixed) and hostname. It would be great to have a boot floppy which would bootstrap an installation over the network. Does anyone have any experience in this area? Any advice on suitable technologies gratefully received. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
Hi Phil [Never done this so can't promise anything] I've used ghost a number of times to perform disk upgrades, and the only time it failed was going from a 3GB to a 10GB, so I would recomend this for the disk cloning. The only thing that I can think of that needs to be unique per machine is the hostname and the IP address. Using DHCP should solve this problem. You can let each PC grab the first available IP when booting, which is the easiest way to do things. The problem here is if you have printers etc. hanging off these PC's then the printer would move when the PC moved. Alternatively, you could man each NIC's MAC address to an IP address so each machine always has the same IP/Hostname. This gives a more stable network but requires more setting up. You could use a mixture of course, and just map MAC's for PC's with printers. You shouldn't have the problem with the NIC's being on different IO Addr/IRQ that you would with a Windows system as the kernel (usually) detects them on bootup. Just don't make the initial build system too specific. Gary. On Tuesday 24 July 2001 10:11 am, Phil Driscoll wrote:
Progress on getting a good system running on the 32Mb machines we've been given is going well. At some point over the summer holidays, we are going to need to install a working system on 123 machines.
The machines all have 'blank' hard drives, a floppy drive and onboard realtek ethernet NIC. I cannot guarantee that all the hard drives are identical, although they are all about 3Gb.
The final setup on the machines will be basically Suse 7.2 with some tweaks - I guess a lightweight kernel and, it currently looks like a hacked version of icewm with all 'toys' removed.
All machines will be identical apart from IP address (fixed) and hostname.
It would be great to have a boot floppy which would bootstrap an installation over the network. Does anyone have any experience in this area? Any advice on suitable technologies gratefully received.
Cheers
-- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000
Alternatively, you could man each NIC's MAC address to an IP address so each machine always has the same IP/Hostname. This gives a more stable network but requires more setting up.
I'd recommend mapping all machiens anyway, and not allowing any dynamic setting. It means you have to "register" every new machine in your DHCP config file, but that gives you some control over the machines and you should anyway be registering your machines somewhere. The big advantage, however, of making your DHCP assignments static is that you know that machine number 45 is always the one in the corner and 72 is the one at the end of the Library, so when you detect naughty things you know immediately where to pounce. You can physically label machines with their IP number (or the last byte) and hostname. Makes management so much easier than if the addresses change every day. -- Christopher Dawkins, Felsted School, Dunmow, Essex CM6 3JG 01371-820527 or 07798 636725 cchd@felsted.essex.sch.uk
On Tuesday 24 July 2001 11:20, Christopher Dawkins wrote:
The big advantage, however, of making your DHCP assignments static is that you know that machine number 45 is always the one in the corner and 72 is the one at the end of the Library, so when you detect naughty things you know immediately where to pounce. You can physically label machines with their IP number (or the last byte) and hostname. Makes management so much easier than if the addresses change every day.
Indeed - this is why we currently use fixed addresses for all machines. Using the MAC mapped DHCP would confer the same advantage, but it's another bit of software which would need to run on the client machines - and they are already short of RAM. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
On Tuesday 24 July 2001 11:29 am, Phil Driscoll wrote:
Indeed - this is why we currently use fixed addresses for all machines. Using the MAC mapped DHCP would confer the same advantage, but it's another bit of software which would need to run on the client machines - and they are already short of RAM.
Cheers
An alternative that you can use with Linux, because config files are plain text, is to have your build image system contain place-holders in it's config file. Then write a small script that populates these place-holders and run it immediately after ghosting the drive. -- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000
'Googling around' has led me to http://systemimager.org a sourceforge hosted GPL project which appears at first sight to do exactly what we need! It has not been tested with the SuSE distribution, but it looks like it's worth a try. Once a 'golden client' machine has been built, an 'image server' - in this case one of out file servers - grabs the image of the machine. You can then boot the clients from floppy and then run the makeautoinstall disc. -- Phil Driscoll
It would be great to have a boot floppy which would bootstrap an installation over the network. Does anyone have any experience in this area? Any advice on suitable technologies gratefully received.
[Apologies in advance for mentioning this on a SuSE list] The Mandrake installation process is excellent for this sort of task. We have boot floppies set up so that we just stick one in, type 'fsc' (Fen Systems client) and leave it running. Works like a charm.* Michael * except when you encounter machines whose hardware lies about its capabilities, such as an on-board S3 Trio64 which claims it can support a much higher refresh rate than it is capable of. Don't ask.
participants (4)
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Christopher Dawkins -
Gary Stainburn -
Michael Brown -
Phil Driscoll