Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 03:15:40AM -0500, Mike Nowlin scribbled: | Handling the OS updates is pretty easy... Is there any equally easy way | to keep a particular set of ports updated automatically? I'd like to | avoid having to do a "make deinstall; make install" all the time... Look at sysinstall's preconfig massive install options. Also, you can roll your own releases. Once the make release is automated, it would be easy. | For security reasons, is there a good package out there that can reliably | determine when an X session has become idle for a period of time (no | mouse/keyboard activity) and "nicely" log that session out? (Assuming | programs that "nicely" handle KILLs...) Xscreensaver | Is there a program out there that can trigger my holodeck to create a | solid-matter hand that can come out of the cooling vents and beat the | hell out of any user who tries to hit the power switch? :) Consider the following setup: 1. seperate partitions on each terminal with: * /usr * /usr/local and /var on the same place * /usr/X11R6 * a directory for user abuse and data. (You can allow users r/w on /usr/local and/or /usr/X11R6) 2. NFS mounted /home if you require worker sharing information. 3. Nightly, or upon whenever you choose to update. Use PXE/rsync/dd or tool of your choice to sync up the seperate partitions. Merry Christmas, -- +--+ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +--+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
Mike Nowlin wrote: I recently made the decision to upgrade all of our net-booted X terminals to full-blown workstations. (Basically, adding a hard drive and some memory.) Having 19 people running Netscape remotely on our Alpha is sucking up a gig of RAM and almost two gigs of swap, not to mention the "normal" things the Alpha has to do... After fighting off (quite violently, I might add) the top-level management who wanted to "just give everyone a Windows 98 machine - I never have any problems with mine at home...!", I came up with the following: -- Celeron 700-ish, 100Mb FXP, 20G, 64 or 128M, S3 or ATI Rage video -- NIS for uname/passwd auth - any user can use any machine -- /home mounted via NFS off a master file server for the users' files -- everything else (with whatever exceptions I find) on the local HD. -- (suggestions???) The users will basically need to be able to run X w/Gnome, StarOffice, Nutscrape, and (the huge, resource-hogging app) telnet. Figure 32MB RAM for FreeBSD X, 64MB for Netscape, and 64MB for StarOffice. If you want to run both Netscape and StarOffice at the same time, 128MB isn't enough. Sigh. If your users have a "usual" work position, you may way to place their home directory on that machine. Export all the home directories and mount them on the other machines using amd. This does make the amd configuration differ from machine to machine, however. WindowMaker feels much more snappy than Gnome on limited CPU resources. I'm not sure a 700 Mhz Celeron really qualifies, though. Durons are cheaper and faster than Celerons, though the motherboards may more than make up the difference in price. FreeBSD runs quite nicely on Duron and Athlon systems based on good motherboards. Good luck, and write an article about it when you're done. DaemonNews would be happy to publish it. ;^) -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
Figure 32MB RAM for FreeBSD X, 64MB for Netscape, and 64MB for StarOffice. If you want to run both Netscape and StarOffice at the same time, 128MB isn't enough. Sigh. Yup... I noticed that 64MB might be a little short when I set one of these up earlier today. :( I think I'll do 128 for now, since the price difference gets absorbed fairly easily into the total cost. Good luck, and write an article about it when you're done. DaemonNews would be happy to publish it. ;^) I may just do that. A real-world commercial FreeBSD success story could be good for PR. Although I have a soft spot in my heart for Linux, I prefer to use FBSD for "important" stuff, and it's about time that it gets some more good press... Due to the fact that this project is for a medical lab that's subject to the upcoming HIPAA regulations (check out www.hcfa.gov) and Medicare compliance policies, there's a lot to be said there about how FBSD handles the security aspects of this whole thing as compared to Redmond products... :) --mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
Wes Peters [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Mike Nowlin wrote: The users will basically need to be able to run X w/Gnome, StarOffice, Nutscrape, and (the huge, resource-hogging app) telnet. Figure 32MB RAM for FreeBSD X, 64MB for Netscape, and 64MB for StarOffice. If you want to run both Netscape and StarOffice at the same time, 128MB isn't enough. Sigh. Avoid StarOffice like the plague. It's neat, but it leaks like a sieve, and barely crawls along on my 450 MHz K6-2. DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 01:45:29AM -0700, Wes Peters wrote:
Figure 32MB RAM for FreeBSD X, 64MB for Netscape, and 64MB for StarOffice.
If you want to run both Netscape and StarOffice at the same time, 128MB
isn't enough. Sigh.
Definatly true. :-(
If your users have a "usual" work position, you may way to place their home
directory on that machine. Export all the home directories and mount them
on the other machines using amd. This does make the amd configuration differ
from machine to machine, however.
If you do it right the files will be the same on each machine. This
simple example shows how to keep a solaris box from loopback nfs
mounting its own file systems. A more complicated setup would do what
you describe with a single amd map (possiable shared via your favorite
directory service):
* -rfs:=/export/home/${key} \
host==draupnir;type:=lofs \
host!=draupnir;rhost:=draupnir
Good luck, and write an article about it when you're done. DaemonNews would
be happy to publish it. ;^)
That would be a really nice article.
-- Brooks
--
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
No one I noticed yet mentioned ports/net/rsync as an alternative to src/usr.bin/rdist ports/net/rdist6 for "keeping lots of systems all the same" but as I too use rdist I can't tell more on rsync. BTW I use rdist for maintaing - site wide common trees in a /site/ tree of etc usr overlay stuff reached from real /etc /usr trees via relative (no rooted) sym links - my off site web directories - my laptop PS make damn sure you always back up the right way, easily said, but easy to get wrong, especially with a cron driven rdist, that can zap your laptop or tower in the wrong direction. EG on return from a business trip a cron driven backup of tower to laptop is a disaster ;-) Julian - Julian Stacey Unix Consultant - Munich Germany http://bim.bsn.com/~jhs/ Considering Linux ? Try FreeBSD with its 4200 packages ! Ihr Rauchen = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz ! Kau/Schnupftabak probieren ! To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
keeping lots of systems all the same...
I recently made the decision to upgrade all of our net-booted X terminals to full-blown workstations. (Basically, adding a hard drive and some memory.) Having 19 people running Netscape remotely on our Alpha is sucking up a gig of RAM and almost two gigs of swap, not to mention the "normal" things the Alpha has to do... After fighting off (quite violently, I might add) the top-level management who wanted to "just give everyone a Windows 98 machine - I never have any problems with mine at home...!", I came up with the following: -- Celeron 700-ish, 100Mb FXP, 20G, 64 or 128M, S3 or ATI Rage video -- NIS for uname/passwd auth - any user can use any machine -- /home mounted via NFS off a master file server for the users' files -- everything else (with whatever exceptions I find) on the local HD. -- (suggestions???) The users will basically need to be able to run X w/Gnome, StarOffice, Nutscrape, and (the huge, resource-hogging app) telnet. I'm planning on building a fairly big machine to do world builds on to keep these machines (30-ish) all synced to the same OS version, probably with weekly installworlds on them. Questions - Handling the OS updates is pretty easy... Is there any equally easy way to keep a particular set of ports updated automatically? I'd like to avoid having to do a "make deinstall; make install" all the time... For security reasons, is there a good package out there that can reliably determine when an X session has become idle for a period of time (no mouse/keyboard activity) and "nicely" log that session out? (Assuming programs that "nicely" handle KILLs...) Is there a program out there that can trigger my holodeck to create a solid-matter hand that can come out of the cooling vents and beat the hell out of any user who tries to hit the power switch? :) --mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 03:15:40AM -0500, Mike Nowlin wrote: Handling the OS updates is pretty easy... Is there any equally easy way to keep a particular set of ports updated automatically? I'd like to avoid having to do a "make deinstall; make install" all the time... What we do is install and look after one machine, and then we use rdist to make all our other machines look identical. We've used this quite effectively for some years - for example on Monday we upgraded 13 machines from 4.1-STABLE to 4.2-STABLE in about 2.5 hours. (If you're interested in our rdist configuration, mail me and I'll send you our config files). David. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 03:15:40AM -0500, Mike Nowlin wrote: I'm planning on building a fairly big machine to do world builds on to keep these machines (30-ish) all synced to the same OS version, probably with weekly installworlds on them. Have you had a look at PXE? Basically, each time the machine reboots you can have it reimage itself from a master server. See http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/pxe/ for details. Your NIC has to support it, and I don't know how long the reimaging process takes over 100Mbit, but it's probably less maintenance effort for you in the long run. N -- Internet connection, $19.95 a month. Computer, $799.95. Modem, $149.95. Telephone line, $24.95 a month. Software, free. USENET transmission, hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Thinking before posting, priceless. Somethings in life you can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard. -- Graham Reed, in the Scary Devil Monastery To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
* Nik Clayton [EMAIL PROTECTED] [001220 03:43] wrote: On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 03:15:40AM -0500, Mike Nowlin wrote: I'm planning on building a fairly big machine to do world builds on to keep these machines (30-ish) all synced to the same OS version, probably with weekly installworlds on them. Have you had a look at PXE? Basically, each time the machine reboots you can have it reimage itself from a master server. See http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/pxe/ for details. Your NIC has to support it, and I don't know how long the reimaging process takes over 100Mbit, but it's probably less maintenance effort for you in the long run. Takes 5-15 minutes per box. :) -- -Alfred Perlstein - [[EMAIL PROTECTED]|[EMAIL PROTECTED]] "I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk." To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
I just redid the autocacher in totally GPL'ed form. the paper on the original one is at http://www.acl.lanl.gov/~rminnich The new one is much simpler and works well. This could be useful, it gives you a caching file system for NFS. let me know if interested. ron To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: keeping lots of systems all the same...
On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 03:15:40AM -0500, Mike Nowlin wrote: I recently made the decision to upgrade all of our net-booted X terminals to full-blown workstations. (Basically, adding a hard drive and some memory.) Having 19 people running Netscape remotely on our Alpha is sucking up a gig of RAM and almost two gigs of swap, not to mention the "normal" things the Alpha has to do... After fighting off (quite violently, I might add) the top-level management who wanted to "just give everyone a Windows 98 machine - I never have any problems with mine at home...!", I came up with the following: -- Celeron 700-ish, 100Mb FXP, 20G, 64 or 128M, S3 or ATI Rage video -- NIS for uname/passwd auth - any user can use any machine -- /home mounted via NFS off a master file server for the users' files -- everything else (with whatever exceptions I find) on the local HD. -- (suggestions???) The users will basically need to be able to run X w/Gnome, StarOffice, Nutscrape, and (the huge, resource-hogging app) telnet. I'm planning on building a fairly big machine to do world builds on to keep these machines (30-ish) all synced to the same OS version, probably with weekly installworlds on them. Questions - Handling the OS updates is pretty easy... Is there any equally easy way to keep a particular set of ports updated automatically? I'd like to avoid having to do a "make deinstall; make install" all the time... I've been using CVSup for privisioning for a couple of years. That can be pretty handy... -- Brian 'you Bastard' Reichert[EMAIL PROTECTED] 37 Crystal Ave. #303Daytime number: (603) 434-6842 Derry NH 03038-1713 USA Intel architecture: the left-hand path To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
