Thomas Krause wrote: > > 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 > Hi Thomas,
1) It should absolutely work for your scenario.. I am running a similar setup here, but across multiple labs. 2) In this case, I partition based on the smallest drive, and let the last partition, /scratch in my case, fill up the remainder of the disk. SI has a installation script, that finds the hard drives, partitions them based on the machine imaged, and then formats the partitions before rsyncing the image onto the disk. Lastly it installs the bootloader and reboots the machine 3) This depends on how the pxe menus work for the machines.. my setup has pxe enabled at all times, but the default pxelinux behavior is to wait for X seconds, and then pass to local boot.. a user can choose to reimage or do whatever else at that time.. you can also use the machine's IP Address in hex as a filename for the boot config, which allows differing default boots depending on the machine (i.e. diskless clients can boot a nfs share of the image, where disked clients can boot local, or reimage) 4) Exactly, it's the OS underlying, with some issues that can crop up on newer hardware with the systemimager kernel and install environment.. it shouldn't be a problem, but only testing can tell. Hopefully this helps, if not, feel free to ask more questions! Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ sisuite-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-users
