On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Peter Tribble wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 5:42 PM, Alok Aggarwal<Alok.Aggarwal at sun.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>>>> Even better would be to have both the install and non-install entries in
>>>>> the
>>>>> grub menu all the time, and have a way on the server to set which one
>>>>> was
>>>>> the default.
>>>>
>>>> We considered providing this choice as part of the grub
>>>> menu. It turns out that that's not very scriptable which
>>>> is why we didn't want to go down that route.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I think this is a fairly unconvincing justification. ?For sites that know
>>> what default they'd like to have, this should be expressable via the
>>> menu.lst, creation of which is completely scriptable on the server side, of
>>> course. ?Requiring use of expect is comparatively quite difficult, IMHO.
>>
>> So, how does it work when I want to script the menu.lst
>> such that the machine does AI once and then just does, say,
>> a network boot (if that's what the boot order has set)
>> thereafter?
>
> Can you detect on the server that AI has been invoked?
>
> If so, then I go to the server, say "I want AI for this host just the
> once", and it writes
> the menu.lst so that AI happens. Client boots, downloads menu.lst,
> invokes AI. The
> server notices the AI installation has been invoked, rewrites menu.lst
> so that AI isn't
> the default so that the right thing happens next time.
The server could potentially detect that AI has
been invoked. But the invocation of AI on the
client may have very little to do with -
a) the fact that the install was actually successful Or,
b) that the user infact wants to reinstall multiple
times (say in a development environment).
In both those cases having sort of a handshake between
the client and the server won't actually be able to
ascertain a user's intent.
> (Or even simply resets it after 30 minutes, which is similar to the
> way that setting
> bootmode from ipmi is only temporary.)
Something like that also runs into problems if the intent
is (b) from above.
Alok
