The torrent/p2p aspect intrigues me. The really sticky point is that 99% of the end systems need to have some kind of windows image zapped onto them.
Scripted windows install really isn't an option as some master images are created by the end customer who quite often manually tweaks and prods and otherwise finesses their desired starting point for their students. Course developers who do this quite often are not easily capable of scripting their initial config, otherwise we'd leverage the heck out of that. Also, the last time I played with scripted windows installs it was pretty slow, akin to the package-by-package method of traditional jumpstart. We also have a bunch of sparc systems, which are way easy to automate via flar jumps and a few finish scripts specific to the class. Anyways, where was I... So, it boils down to something that pxe boots, pulls (or is pushed) image data, partitions the drive and basically does a dd < /net/ wherever > /dev/disk0 I suppose we could break the hardware mirror on the machines and use the second drive as cache for compressed images distributed via p2p, and once each node determines it has a valid complete copy of what needs to run it unpacks it onto the first drive and boots from disk. That actually sounds like fun, but of course I only have 72 hours worth of other work every day to get through besides redeveloping the udpcast based stuff that has served as reasonable stop gap for a couple of years now. Thanks for the info thus far. I'll definitely get knee deep into the switch diagnosis with my networking guys. I know enough networking to be dangerous but maybe they need a cabbage head asking dumb questions to help them spot the trouble. Trever _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
