Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 11:32:13 -0500 (EST) From: Thomas Stromberg <tstromberg@rtci.com> To: Forrest Aldrich <forrie@forrie.com> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.20.0003171046210.7881-100000@barracuda.aquarium.rtci.com> In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20000317074445.00b60d90@216.67.12.69>
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As far as keeping them "up to date", this is what we do: - Have a local cvsup-mirror server - All FreeBSD workstations and servers cvsup (just ports) off of it nightly. - Our central build server (which doubles as an insanely overpowered SMP dns server), builds -STABLE, and all kernels nightly When we want to upgrade a machine to current, we just: mount buildbox:/usr/src /usr/src mount buiildbox:/usr/obj /usr/obj cd /usr/src make installworld mergemaster cd /usr/src/sys/compile/<mykernel> make install reboot This process takes about 15 min on our 100M/s network. We don't do it too often of course, because of the downtime involved, but. As far as keeping the machines "identical", you may want to look into one of the hacks i've seen where in a school lab they boot off a floppy which dd's the hard drives off of an nfs share. I can't remember where I saw this unfortunatly. (not sure if this answers your question, but I hope it odes) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Thomas R. Stromberg Senior Systems Administrator : > smtp[tstromberg@rtci.com] Research Triangle Commerce, Inc. : > http[afterthought.org] pots[1.919.657.1317] : > irc[helixblue] FreeBSD Contributor, Perl Hacker : ------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Forrest Aldrich wrote: > There was mentioned that someone was "appointed" (perhaps unwillingly :) to > look into this one... who? > > I was also curious about what people do to keep a fleet of FreeBSD machines > up-to-date with CVSup and buildworld. I can't imagine manually going to > more than 100 machines and doing the same thing manually... how time consuming. > > To summarize again, we are deploying status monitoring machines into POPs, > across the US. Those machines are identical in terms of hardware, et > al. We were hoping to find a means by which to streamline the installation > process, such that we could create (say) custom boot floppies where you'd > input minimum information (IP address, hostname, domain, etc.) and it would > then go off and perform the installation (from fdisk, newfs... to editing > packet filters appropriately, which make require a "template" of sorts). > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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