Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

May as well jump on the bandwagon here. Ive been dabbling in getting
a easy to setup/maintain cluster of smgl boxes going. The main purpose
being for a prometheus farm (lets see I've got a month before 1.0 to
find all the bugs...)

Anyways my solution for installing things was the following:
Create some sort of base image system (this is taken from a pre-existing
system from the latest iso). Along with that, some cached packages for
optional things that only certain computers would need. I also have
a very minimal directory tree with some fsprogs, mount, sfdisk, cp,
and busybox. I export that over NFS. Then I setup a dhcp/bootp server,
and a tftp server. Then when I want to setup a new system I have the new
machines netboot through the magic of pxe. Pxe gets the ip address from
dhcp, then grabs an nfsroot enabled kernel and initial configuration
with tftp. The kernel loads and mounts that tiny directory tree as
roon. Busybox runs as init and runs a script that 1) partitions the drive,
2) mkfs's the new partitions, 3) mounts that pre-made image over nfs 4)
cp's the image to the local disk, and 5) chroots into the new local drive
and sets up anything else it needs to, such as lilo and resurecting some
caches packages, setting up prometheus, etc. and finally 6) adjust the
tftp directory so the computer boots up with a normal kernel rather than
the reinstall configuration.

A little crufty but once I have a script to take a system and make an
image out of it, along with some scripts to do the step 5 better,
it doesn't get any more automated than that...well until I design a
robot to read the mac address off of the ethernet card into the computer.

-Andrew

-- 
________________________________________________________________________
|Andrew D. Stitt                             | astitt AT sourcemage.org    |
|irc: afrayedknot                            | afrayedknot AT t.armory.com |
|aim: thefrayedknot or iteratorplusplus      |                          |
|Grimoire Guru ham/smgl, Porting Team Lead   | ftp://t.armory.com       |
|Author and Maintainer of Prometheus         |                          |
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