As I'm stuck using Outlook Web Access at work, I'll reply in bold below and leave a good deal of space to highlight my replies (I prefer using thunderbird and it's > bracketed replying system, *sigh*).
________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Andrea Righi Sent: Sun 11/5/2006 11:02 AM To: sisuite-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Sisuite-users] Introduction, and my issues Simon Ruiz wrote: > We've been using Norton Ghost for all our imaging needs, and I had to > come up with a pretty convoluted system to really be able to use it > effectively to keep all the workstations updated (read all about it > at my homepage http://www.mccsc.edu/~sruiz/5.10/imaging.htm). If you > notice, I was already using your jargon (golden client) since I have > been intending on moving to SystemImager since the beginning of this > in the interest of removing proprietary software from our system > altogether. Totally agree! ;-) anyway norton ghost approach is totally different and it's totally filesystem-agnostic. Systemimager has other big advantages (and disadvantages), it treats filesystem images instead of block-by-block disk images, and for now you cannot manage windows installations (at least not for now...). But I'm sure that with systemimager you can obtain better results dealing with different hardware respect to the disk images approach. I am not responsible for any imaging or distributed updates/configuration changes on any Windows boxes. We have a corporate IT department that takes care of the Windows boxes. They have divorced themselves from this Linux project so I have to provide 100% of the support for it, and I can't do this on my own so I reach out to the community. You. I must admit I'm glad to see someone reply to the questions, as I was about to give the mailing list up for dead based on the question/response ratio before you jumped on and answered all those questions. The more I come to understand SystemImager, though, I'll also be able to help. > 1) I want identical workstations, however since we have 2 (soon 3) > hardware specs to work with (Dell 170Ls with IDE drives, Dell 210Ls > with SATA drives, and soon some laptops), it seems like I'm going to > have to maintain 3 separate images. My question regarding this is: is > there a simple way to keep from having to maintain three separate > golden clients for this? The vast majority of the image, is going to > supposedly be identical between all the different hardware types, and > I can't imagine that the parts that are different are all that > dynamic... Regarding the hardware heterogeneity you can resolve using the standard kernel of a common distribution in your image, in this way you'll be sure that your image will be able to support different hardware devices. During the installation you should be able to manage the heterogeneity using UYOK feature (http://wiki.systemimager.org/index.php/UYOK) and --autodetect-disks option with si_getimage (or si_mkautoinstallscript). At least I've successfully installed a little lab with IDE and SCSI workstations in this way, using the same identical image. In my experience, using an image of Ubuntu that was created on the 170Ls would not quite work on the 210Ls, however you have piqued my curiosity, and I'll experiment with that a little. It wasn't the kernel that was the problem, I believe, it was some configuration files (which I may well be able to change, given some troubleshooting...I'd just so far been using one image per hardware model). I wonder, though, if I should probably have a different image for the laptops (that we have yet to get) at least, given their need for special power management packages and such that are not necessary on the desktops. What do you think? > 2) In our network, we already have a DHCP server and have been > functioning with dynamic IPs thus far. We have no control over the > DHCP server and are not allowed to interfere with its normal > functioning. Is it a requirement that we turn around and assign > static IPs to the workstations now? Is there a simple way to work > with hostnames instead? Not a huge issue, really, it'd just take > communicating with the corporate people and letting them know we need > this done, and then waiting for them to do it. You can boot your workstation with an autoinstalling cd (see si_mkautoinstallcd) and define all the local options in the kernel boot parameters (http://wiki.systemimager.org/index.php/Installation_Parameters). IMHO a good approach would be to get the ip via dhcp and manually define the parameter that you can't define via the dhcp server (like the address of the image server, the image to use, the monitor server, etc), in this way you can use the same CD to install all the workstation. But, the question is should DHCP be set up to assign the workstations Static IP's? It seems from reading the documentation that this would help out quite a bit, but I don't want to go through the trouble of getting our corporate IT people to configure the DHCP server that way if I'm mis-judging what I read. Only the 210Ls have optical disc drives, and none of the computers have /dev/fd0 floppies (we have some USB floppy drives we need to use to use Ghost), so I'll either have to figure out how to boot the 170Ls from the harddisk and use Norton Ghost to jumpstart the conversion to System Imager or figure out (as you mention below) how to get them to boot from a usb storage device (this would be, likely, the best option, as it would mean I wouldn't need to keep Ghost actively around for any compelling backup reasons). > 3) So, I used mkautoinstalldiskette to, well, make an autoinstall > diskette. I could not set it to make the diskette at /dev/sda which > is where our USB disk drive is, so I made an image file and DDed that > to the diskette. This does not work, as the diskette (I think) > assumes it's going to be /dev/fd0. The actual error message for this > is "Checking for floppy diskette." followed by a reocurring > "end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 0. Am I basically > screwed as far as using diskettes since all we have are USB disk > drives? That would be rather annoying, especially considering the > following: si_mkautoinstalldiskette is deprecated, you need to use an autoinstallcd. If you want to use a USB key and if you BIOS support the boot over USB, you need to manually create a USB boot key, copying the systemimager kernel and initrd on it (at the moment there is not a si_mkautoinstallusbdev or a similar command). I think you can create that using grub-install or lilo, but I've never tried it... So, could I take the contents of the si_mkautoinstalldiskette and plop them on a USB key, modify the USB key's MBR with grub and have this working? Out of curiosity, since I'm mostly interested in doing this over a network, might there be a way to do this all from the USB key (that is, with a USB key large enough to hold a copy of the image on it?). I'm going to have to dig into BitTorrent delivery, as well, as we've got 279 workstations. > 4) Next I tried installing systemimager-client on the client to be > re-imaged, and set it up to boot SystemImager from the hard disk. > This does not work either. The error occurs because it tries to check > the partitions and doesn't recognize the FAT12 partition (hda1 or > hd0,0) that we have running in order to enable the use of GRUB 4 DOS > which we need to boot to a diskette image in order to be able to > Ghost a machine without running around with our silly little slow USB > disk drives. Since it cannot recognize that partition (and in fact, I > think it mangles it by overwriting the MBR on the hard disk so it > likely can't recognize it because it destroyed it), it cannot read > the partition table. Later on in the process I get the very evocative > "FATAL: Couldn't mount hard drive!" error followed by some likely > irrelevant stuff about how the kernel needs all necessary block and > filesystem drivers. So...any ideas? am I going to have to Ghost an > image onto the workstations, one that doesn't have a FAT12 partition > in hda1, in order to be able to boot SystemImage from the harddisk? > (The FAT12 partition is FreeDOS, and I had a hell of a headache > getting it to work in the first place, I know that Linux doesn't > quite like dealing with that partition) which version of systemconfigurator are you using? are you using lilo or grub in you client? versions? Whichever version comes from the Ubuntu universe repository, let me check...3.2.3-3 is what they all are in the repository. Using GRUB, version 0.97-1ubuntu9. My suspicion is that the problem is with the FAT12 partition being in the way (you mentioned SystemInstaller doesn't support Microsoft filesystems, right?). I'll see what I can do about testing that theory. Regards, -Andrea ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Sisuite-users mailing list Sisuite-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-users Thanks for your response, Andrea, you have pointed me in some good directions! I hope this finds everyone having a great day! Simón ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Sisuite-users mailing list Sisuite-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-users
