Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1998 14:39:55 -0400 (EDT) From: "Ron G. Minnich" <rminnich@Sarnoff.COM> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: unattended install Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980707142831.3601G-100000@terra>
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I brought up unattended install at theo's talk on openbsd, and got something of a brushoff (understandable: they had done 40-ish machines in short order for the terminal room, so it did not seem necessary to them). Unattended install is critical to clustering, although it's nice for everything else (I've been using it for 10 years now, both my own hacks and vendor's hacks where available). Consider that all 128 machines in our new cluster *do not have video cards*, and you get an idea of the problem. You can't sit there and install the OS ineractively -- no video, no keyboard, no mouse! Every one of these machines was brought up with our own in-house unattended install. It's not something you want to show your children: we build a prototype machine, toss some scripts in /, then burn a CD rom from the root file system which along with the scripts does the job. You boot the CD and 7 minutes later you have a machine, complete with bootp-provided IP address, ready to go. Once you have that first CD, you clone 7 or so more to get the parallelism. Ugly, but: using our system we can reload the entire rack (128 machines) in less than an hour. (and yes, we used to do network reloads starting 10 years ago until about 5 years ago, but once you get above a certain number of machines things get slow due to contention) (although even absent contention the CDrom has proven to be faster). I'm mentioning it here cause it will take some good thinking. I should also mention that Solaris, Windows/NT and Linux have working unattended install support. We will probably chuck our in-house unattended install on the Linux boxes for the linux kickstart system. So for you good hackers out there who may be thinking on install tools, please give a thought to the need for unattended install. thanks ron Ron Minnich |Java: an operating-system-independent, rminnich@sarnoff.com |architecture-independent programming language (609)-734-3120 |for Windows/95 and Windows/NT on the Pentium ftp://ftp.sarnoff.com/pub/mnfs/www/docs/cluster.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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