I'm grateful for Jeff's feedback, although it's not what I wanted to hear :-( We're really happy with SystemImager because it lets us clone a customized node's disk image. The last time I looked at Kickstart it used RPM packages, leaving a lot of customization to be done afterwards. AutoYast is for SuSE Linux only, right ?
If we decide for AMD64 machines (which perform very great on our codes), we'll need really efficient network installation methods for hundreds of nodes. Are there any scaleable alternatives to SystemImager ? I suppose that IBM delivers proprietary solutions for eServer AMD64 clusters...
/Ole
Jeff Johnson wrote:
You can look back in the mailing list archives and find other unsuccessful attempts at using systemimager with AMD64.
You will run into several pitfalls:
You can PXE boot a 32-bit kernel and ramdisk image, partition/mkfs the disk and rsync the master image. This will fail at the postinstall stage when the chroot into the new rsynced tree occurs for setting up the boot block. You will not be able to chroot into a 64-bit OS from a 32-bit kernel. Attempts were made to create a temporary 32-bit bin and lib inside the rsynced tree just for doing the postinstall but they failed.
I managed to compile the ramdisk image and boel binaries from source under AMD64 (with some tweaking to the source) but I was unsuccessful in compiling an AMD64 kernel that would successfully PXE boot.
I ended up getting some AMD64 systems imaged but it involved a really UGLY combination of using systemimager and a 32-bit PXE kernel for all of the mkfs and rsync stuff and then manually booting a OS rescue cdrom and manually doing the boot block installations and system configurations.
IMHO, you would be better off doing a network kickstart or AutoYast installation.
On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 07:27, Ole Holm Nielsen wrote:
We're testing an AMD64 Opteron (IBM eServer 325) machine for potential installation into our Linux cluster. We're testing the disk cloning using SystemImager 3.0.1 on Redhat Enterprise Linux 3.0.
We can copy a golden client image to the server, and we can network boot the eServer 325 using PXE. But we seem to have some troubles building a kernel which recognizes all needed devices in the eServer 325, since the booting invariable hangs at different places along the way.
Has anyone succeeded in installing such any AMD64 Opteron machine, or specifically an IBM eServer 325, using SystemImager ? Any information will be appreciated.
Ole Holm Nielsen Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark
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