In a message dated: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 10:01:38 EST
Joel Martin said:
>When I worked as a network administrator at my university we developed
>an "imaging" system called JACAL that does this same task except it
>does it for Windows NT and Linux and can create dual-boot systems.
>It's been in use there for a couple of years.
The one thing I miss about proprietary hardware sometimes is the
benefit of proprieatry hardware. From a "mass installation"
point-of-view, Sun created something called JumpStart a few years ago
which has been vastly improved from release to release of Solaris.
The nice thing about it was that you only had to add the new system
to the server side config file by giving it an IP/Hostname.
Turning the client on in most cases was all that was needed, worst
case was you typed 'boot net - install' at the EEPROM prompt and that
was it. JumpStart would take over and figure out the architecture of
the system, and partition the drive appropriately then proceed with
installing the OS. Start/Finish scripts could be employed before and
after the partitioning/installation to do things like save certain
data on the hard-drive and customize the OS to the local environment.
The big differences between JumpStart and RH's Kickstart are:
- RH requires a boot floppy because PC's generally don't
have EEPROMs on them and every PC is different
- JumpStart is a much more mature product and therefore a lot
easier to deal with
- KickStart is from RH, which usually means a lot stupid
little bugs that take ages to get fixed
- There are more large installations using Suns on the desktop
than Linux based PCs. (this hopefully changing :) so there's
a much larger base of users for JumpStart. Which, obviously
means that Sun is going to pay attention, whereas RH might
not :)
However, RH's KickStart has tremendous potential. RH just needs to
get serious about it.
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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