Hello,
I recently became the administrator of a small school. The school has
basically a single computer room with about 30 computers and another dozen
computers distributed in different class rooms. Since I'm doing this job on
my free time I want to minimize the amount of time I have to spent, while
still keeping all computers working in a good state. The main tasks I have
to perform regularly are:
- Adding a new feature/program to all clients in the school or
changing the existing configuration
- Restore a client to a working state (often boot-problems or other
problems caused by pupils turning the power off without proper shutdown,
etc)
Most of the computers have the same hardware, but not all of them. Also some
(2-3) of the clients are currently diskless and are booting via PXE and
mounting their file systems directly from an NFS share.
I don't want to run the clients as stupid terminals, since the client
hardware is good enough and the server is not powerful enough.
To ease the tasks described above I'm thinking about image based
installation and updating of the clients and came across your project. So
far it looks very promising, but unfortunately I couldn't answer all my
questions myself by looking through your documentation. So here it goes:
1. Do you think that SI is suitable for this kind of scenario?
2. If I understand correctly SI is file-based, meaning that unlike
typical imaging programs (ghost, etc.) it copies files (or better: file
deltas) to the server and not whole partitions. If that is the case, then
how does SI work on a fresh client with an empty hard drive? Do you store
additional partition infos? And if yes, how do you handle differing hard
disk sizes (e.g. client hard disk is smaller or larger than original hard
disk)?
3. On feature of SI is that clients can run the SI client directly
over PXE, which I find easier than running from one PC to another with a CD.
IIRC you have to enable this for specific clients first. What happens with
clients which are not enabled? Will they boot normally from their hard disk
(that would allow me to simply enable PXE permanently for all clients in the
bios). Also how will this conflict with the existing PXE server for diskless
clients? Ideally I would be able to differentiate between diskless PXE
clients, and the "image update" PXE clients by MAC-Address.
4. How well does SI work with different hardware. I guess this is
mainly determined by the os itself (Kubuntu 7.04 in this case), but there
seems to be some things SI can help me with (SystemConfigurator?). One of
the things I want to do is to run my golden master client on a Virtual
Machine (VirtualBox), so that I can make changes at home without having to
use a separate computer. Do you think this is possible, or are the
differences between real and virtual hardware to big?
Thank you very much for your time!
Thomas Krause
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