On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Smith, Jeffery S (Scott) wrote:
> I believe we were the ones who requested the reinstallation boot disk. I don't recall whether you requested it, or it was suggested by us to satisfy a more general disaster recovery requirement that you had (I think the latter), but the development was definitely funded by Reynolds and Reynolds. Take a bow :-) > Our purpose was simple: Provide a boot disk that would put a system > right back on the network, without manual configuration. The intent > was to be able to restore a crashed server quickly by 1) booting the > reinstall disk, and 2) going to a workstation and executing a restore. > > It seems the process is not quite refined enough, as it attempts to > save/restore far more settings than are required for this purpose. True. But the alternative to this is the re-install floppy being selective about the configuration items it saves, and that introduces the risk that something relevant will be omitted. This wouldn't be an issue if there was oodles of free space on the floppy. And in fact there could be, if the initrd file on the floppy were to be rebuilt to contain only drivers needed by the current hardware. But that too has a down side, in that that would limit the portability of the re-install floppy to different hardware (e.g. a new server with a different SCSI adaptor). > Also, in comparing the ks.cfg from the normal boot disk to the ks.cfg from > the reinstallation boot disk, I see that there are far more settings in the > reinstall version. Question to Mitel: Is this necessary, or simply an > oversight? The 5.x version of the reinstall ks.cfg looks like the old 4.x > version, which looked like the 4.x boot disk ks.cfg. I would have thought > the 5.x reinstall ks.cfg would look more like the 5.x boot ks.cfg. It's necessary given how the install/mirror/upgrade dialog is initiated. That dialog only appears if the kickstart file is the minimal kickstart file which you refer to as the 5.x boot ks.cfg. After that dialog, the kickstart file being used is effectively discarded by the installer, and one of the complete ones from the CDROM is used in its place. In order to have the fully automated re-installation process, you need a "full" kickstart file. -- Charlie Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lead Product Developer Network Server Solutions Group http://www.e-smith.com/ Mitel Networks Corporation http://www.mitel.com/ Phone: +1 (613) 368 4376 or 564 8000 Fax: +1 (613) 564 7739 -- Please report bugs to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] (only) to discuss security issues Support for registered customers and partners to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives by mail and http://www.mail-archive.com/devinfo%40lists.e-smith.org
