Chris Rijk wrote: > Late reply time... > > > dminer wrote: >> The usability issues with WAN installation are a priority to fix; our >> current support for this is way too hard to set up on the server side. >> >> What I see is that there are tradeoffs to be made by each user. In >> section 4.1.8 of the paper, I broke down the performance into three >> broad categories, synopses of which were: >> >> 1. download & burn media >> 2. start the installer and provide any inputs >> 3. lay down the bits and get them running >> >> A Sun-provided WAN installation service minimizes #1, while increasing >> #3 (and perhaps #2); overall it should be the fastest option for a >> single install, and as WAN speed and reliability increase it seems the >> advantage will widen. Avoiding burning also minimizes #1 to some >> extent. If you're going to do more than a one-off install, you're >> better off creating a cache on the local LAN, so that you optimize #3. > > I agree that for wall-clock time, WAN installation should be fastest > (for a single once-off install). > > For users who don't have an alternative machine they can use while > installing Solaris, they are most likely to want to download Solaris > in the background while using the machine - today they would download > and burn to CD/DVD. In other words, what they care most about is > system downtime, not end to end install time. WAN install could > easily take 5 or more hours, unless they have unusually fast > networking. I think this would be typical for someone installing at > home - eg an enthusiast or developer without access to a spare machine > they could use at work. > > In such cases, being able to install off an existing partition on the > HD (or from compact flash) instead of DVD would be nice. >
I agree with all of your thoughts here, Chris. One thing I should note is that internally to Sun, we do a form of this already, and have for as long as I can remember. As each Solaris build is released, each of our engineering sites has at least one netinstall server which retrieves a copy of the image as a cpio archive using ftp and validates/unpacks it locally - it's the same result you'd get if you downloaded an ISO image, did the stuff to mount it as a lofs, and then ran setup_install_server. Then each of us does our upgrades as we see fit; using Live Upgrade limits the downtime to the 5 minutes or so a reboot takes. I think we'll move beyond just providing .iso's as the only public download option (flash archives perform much better, for instance), but I need to get release engineering and other parts of the process to buy in. > btw, as a side-note, currently Solaris's installer doesn't seem to > handle CD/DVD burn errors very well - if the checksums fail, it just > seems to carry on. I've had this in the past, and a friend of mine got > this recently when installing Solaris 10 for the first time. > Yeah, known issue. Marketing's been asking for us to do something, it's part of what's meant by #12 in my requirements list. > >>> When you say "duty cycles for flash drives aren't quite up to hard >>> drive standards", do you mean the number of re-writes Flash cells can >>> handle without errors? If I recall correctly, Flash cells can >>> generally handle many billion re-writes on average, and also has >>> support for offlining groups of cells in a similar way to how hard >>> discs handle bad sectors. Sounds like you have looked at this more >>> closely than me though. btw, wouldn't ZFS's copy-on-write help a bit >>> by spreading the writes around...? >>> >> I can't say I've looked at it that closely, my info is secondhand. We >> certainly have hot spots in the system which would make me skeptical >> that it's a good idea right now. ZFS might help, I guess, though I >> don't think it was explicitly designed for this purpose so it's more a >> side-effect than intentional, and thus seems likely to not be completely >> effective. > > Hmm, I note that Sun's new Netra CT900 has support for compact flash, > but I can't seem to find more info. If it's good enough for 5-9s > telco, it's probably good enough for general use. > It has slots, but I don't know if you can boot off of them. Dave
