Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 12:12:00 -0700 From: "Matt" <mattl3@earthlink.net> To: "Michael Scheidell" <scheidell@secnap.net>, "Peter Wemm" <peter@wemm.org> Cc: <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Best way to install on Dozens of boxes? Message-ID: <004701c2238e$afcf45c0$4e76cb3f@ssn> References: <20020704182346.02A1F390F@overcee.wemm.org>
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You can also use CFS software from www.xgforce.com to help for package
installations to many fbsds. It's a good replication software for fbsd.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Wemm" <peter@wemm.org>
To: "Michael Scheidell" <scheidell@secnap.net>
Cc: <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Sent: Thursday, July 04, 2002 11:23 AM
Subject: Re: Best way to install on Dozens of boxes?
> "Michael Scheidell" wrote:
> > If I want to install FBSD 4.5 on dozens of identical boxes, what is the
best
> > way?
> >
> > I don't want to take the disks out and dup/mirror them, not dozens of
them.
> >
> > The hardware supports pxe and I had half a hope that I could set up a
master
> > system with bootpd, let each target system boot by itself and load its
own
> > image.
> >
> > This would be to a 'virgin' hd, with no slice or partitions yet.
> >
> > What about a master boot cd rom?
> > What about setting up and alternate ftp source and 'release' image? one
that
> > we managed and controlled?
>
>
> At yahoo, we do this by the thousand. We netboot using PXE, and have
about
> a 30MB 'mfsroot' image that is preloaded by the netboot loader. The
system
> boots up to a fairly full functional mini-freebsd.
>
> Then, from NFS, we run a script ("clone" - we used to do this
disk-to-disk)
> that partitions and installs a set of cpio.gz images from the NFS server.
> We just tell the clone script what hostname we want (it looks it up in
DNS)
> and what drive to install on (we have a lot of hardware variation) and any
> tweaks to partition sizes.
>
> We did write our own tool to do the partitioning and bootblock installs.
> scripting fdisk/disklabel/etc is too painful - especially when some of our
> installs need to preserve a server 'system partition' (ugh).
>
> The netboot takes less than a minute, the install takes 2-3 minutes at the
> most. After the network install is done, power off (netbooted remember)
and
> turn off netboot and we're away.
>
> We also find this environment invalueable for repairing damaged systems.
> Simply netboot the machine in the rack (we have the netboot environment
> available just about everywhere) and we have a fairly functional system
> running from ramdisk that we can use to work on a corrupted OS.
>
> We haven't used sysinstall at yahoo for years - except for a small number
> of isolated incidents. Our needs are probably different to yours though,
> because we need to do this continually and the time investment to build
> the system has well and truely paid off. If you only have a small number
> to do, a custom sysinstall is probably more suitable. I believe Alfred's
> PXE pages describe this. You may like to burn a CD-RW or something for
> it if that works for you.
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/
>
> Cheers,
> -Peter
> --
> Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com
> "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
>
>
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