Simon Ruiz wrote: > So, the classroom imaged alright overnight. It seems like the server > ran out of memory and had to kill a few processes during the course > of the imaging process, but every workstation seemed to image fine. > The beeping classroom was rather amusing when I came in. > > Might this locking up of the server be alleviated by popping in some > more memory? (it's only got 512 right now, I believe, it's just > exactly the same type of hardware as the workstations, really) or > will it simply eat up as much memory as it gets and still lock up?
You should try to use the BitTorrent trasnport. It strongly reduces the load on the image server and you should see a huge improvement in the total time of deployment... obviously only if you'll have to reimage your clients... > > Other than that, let me see...Ummm...ok, yeah, so when I do an > si_updateclient, it seems to wipe out every change I make during the > autoconfig script that first time, EXCEPT for the hostname, which > keeps the workstation from realizing it needs to run the autoconfig > script again. I can change it to test the contents of /etc/hosts/ > instead of the $HOSTNAME variable, though I suppose I should really > figure out how all the systemimager scripts work and see if maybe > they would help me accomplish my goals in an easier way. > > Also, is there any way to trigger an autoinstall on the workstation > and pass it the imagename? trying to do si_updateclient with both > --autoinstall and --image doesn't seem to work... > I've introduced, only in the trunk for now, the new command si_pushoverrides. This implements a new different approach to distribute files to the clients. Theoretically we can define 3 different levels of files distribution, ordered from the most dangerous to the safest: 1) imaging the nodes (a complete re-installation from scratch) 2) reset the nodes to a default known installation (via si_updateclient) 3) distribute files (typically configuration files) to customize a default installation (via si_pushoverrides) Obviously with the first approach you need to completely stop the production in your machines during the deployment. Typically you should use this method only at the beginning of your cluster / servers production or when you strongly do changes on the distributions that you're using in your clients. The second approach can be used to reset the image to a known state. The command si_updateclient, in fact, performs a re-sync of the whole client filesystem (except some customizable exclusions, see /etc/systemimager/updateclient.local.exclude). In this case you must evaluate if this process is dangerous enough for your applications, because you can lose some of your customizations and you could change something that you don't expect (remember that the update is done in the whole image.. I repeat: it is done in the whole image! :-) In general is the sysadmin that should evaluate if this operation can be dangerous enough to stop production or not... But, at the moment, there is not a totally safe way to distribute files to the clients in SystemImager. This is the reason because I wanted to add the si_pushoverrides command. With this command you can use the overrides to push only a set of files from the image server to your clients (using rsync over SSH for the backend). In this way the whole image is not touched, but only the files you put in the defined overrides can be overwritten. Using a configuration file you can also define the topology of your clients. This can be very useful for clusters that have different subsets of nodes, like compute nodes, frontend nodes, I/O servers, etc based on the same image. I should say that si_pushoverrides is under development, but I'm already using it in production on 2 clusters; it seems to work very well, and to satisfy all the requirements above. I would like to release it in the 3.9.0 (unstable) soon, maybe we could backport also in the 3.8.x branch... moreover, I'll write a howto on wiki soon... Regads, -Andrea ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ sisuite-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-users
