On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 1:00 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Andrew, > > I'm very interested in using this functionality to deploy a large number of > systems for a datacenter project that I am working on. I do have some ideas > for functionality in case you might be interested. > > 1. Since uploading images is mostly a rare event would it make sense to > just use some other tool, e.g. one of the partimage based CDs (e.g. > clonezilla) to upload the images via ssh/sshfs/ftp/smb. This will avoid the > need to use an insecure nfs that allows root access and avoids the need to > store SSH keys. > > 2. Maybe use ftp/ssh/sshfs/http to download the images. This would also > avoid the use of NFS. > > I like both these ideas, and think it'd be a good idea. Downloading them from a read only nfs share, or from any other protocol is an easy change. However, saving an image still needs to be automatic, and there's no particularly easy way to do that without being insecure.
There could certainly be a more secure option that would involve one going to the machine and typing their ssh password for example, but for the use cases I have in mind, we need it to be fully automatic. > 3. Partimage based apps can also upload just the filesystem images (as > opposed to the entire disk). I was trying to work on a system using > clonezilla that can PXE boot an installer which will download the partition > table then partition the target disk then copy the filesystems onto the > partitions. After the image is copied the image filesystem could be resized > to match the partition size. I figure that this would require smaller images > as the entire disk image would not need to be transferred. > partimage-ng does the saving and loading now, and you can pass it an individual partition or an entire disk to save. I've done this on purpose to be flexable, it should work with partitions or with disks, although I've only tested it with entire disks. Resizing partitions however is tricky, since it's very dependent on the sizes of the disks and on the filesystem. My stance right now is to do any needed resizing manually, since there's no good way to generalize it. However, it shouldn't be hard to extend it on a case by case basis as needed by making a custom cloner. > > By the way, I read the instructions on the wiki but could not figure out > where to get the cloner-live-cd.iso. Is this just the Fedora Live iso? > the cloner-live-cd.iso is a live cd built from the fedora livecd-tools. You use the base.cfg along with the build.py script that I think I posted somewhere earlier in this thread to generate it. Then use the livecd-iso-to-pxe utility to generate from the iso a kernel and initrd. That kernel and initrd is what you put into cobbler with "cobbler distro add". -Andrew
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