Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 09:12:46 -0500 (EST) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Network booting, I'm off to work (was Re: GENERIC build broken) Message-ID: <14369.35974.496839.872957@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <199911031909.LAA06730@dingo.cdrom.com> References: <199911031843.KAA60534@apollo.backplane.com> <199911031909.LAA06730@dingo.cdrom.com>
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Mike, I'm not trying to contribute to the FUD, rather I'm just trying to understand what you're proposing and what effect it will have on my current environment. Right now we have an OS research cluster of 30+ Pentium II machines. These machines are used for both real research & for class projects by students who have root access to them & who can install their own hacked kernels. These machines are essentially crashboxes. These machines boot off of local IDE & SCSI disks. They are all rackmounted, so they run headless & have their console via a serial port. Most do not even have graphics cards installed. Interacting with the BIOS is a painful process involving walking over to the lab, pulling a box off the rack, moving it to the workbench, inserting a video card & attaching a monitor/kbd. My install process is to boot the machines diskless via a BOOTP kernel stashed away on the root filesystem of the machine (or on a floppy if it is a first time install, or if things get really out of hand). When a machine boots diskless, it mounts a shared volume on the installation server. A script is run (I call it mirror) which disklabels the disk & restores a dump(8)ed backup of a good 'prototype' machine. The script continues on to massage a few configuration files (eg, setting the hostname & ipaddr) and builds an fstab based on what the root disks name is. All of this takes about 10 minutes max. Maybe 15 if I have to walk over to the lab & plunk a floppy in the box. Because these machines get trashed fairly frequently (students with root access who are hacking device drivers can trash all sorts of things in many fun & exciting ways! You should try it if you're in need of laughs sometime!) the ability to restore a box to sanity quickly is very important to me. My question boils down to: Will I be able to re-install a machine using your new i386 netboot just as easily as I can now? Or will I have to be physically present at each machine & diddle with the bios to toggle between disk & netboots? And what if the NIC doesn't support PXE? Am I just SOL? Again, I'm not trying to contribute to the FUD. I'm just not sure I understand how what you are proposing will affect me. Thanks, Drew ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin Duke University Email: gallatin@cs.duke.edu Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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