I just wanted to share my experience with SystemImager.. I may be doing something different than most of you and wanted to enlighten you to this technique I've sort-of established...
Essentially what I've been attempting to do in our data center was to utilize SI in a proof-of-concept approach to see what I could do with it and if it were something better to replace our current method which is quite hacked up and uses pxeboot and kickstart et al. I wanted to use SystemImager because of it's great amount of functionality - Quick deployment of images, using bittorrent, rsync, flamethrower.. Monitoring.. Virtual Console.. among it's vast amount of tools to easily manage imaging and prepare the whole boot environment or just for the fact that it can be used with CDs, Floppys.. USB keys.. etc... I don't need to explain about how great and useful this product truly is! But my problem? A lot of different hardware platforms needed to be supported and I don't like the idea of using and maintaining several images for our development environment. The administration would become a headache to say the least. So what I've been attempting to do is establish a SINGLE Golden Image and use this across our different hardware platforms... I've been making my tests with RHEL4.0. My technique was such that I collected a Golden Image of each hardware platform with RH4.0 installed and then did a diff against my true Golden Image to see which files have changed. Those files I've then extracted from each hardware platform and placed them into their respective OVERRIDE directories. Then based on which platform used, it called a different master file which dictated such things are which network card to use and so on, so forth.. but ultimately each master file dictated which OVERRIDE directory to use. This has ensured that I have an easy method to implement new hardware platforms and reduced my administration / disk space requirements dramatically. Once I was sure that it was capable of installing on said hardware platform, I would then remove it's corresponding golden image to save space. It had served it's purpose (diff.) To tie all this together I built my own script that requires 2 inputs.. 1) OS type and 2) hostname. Based on this information it would reach out to a database (our asset database) to grab information of that hostname (hardware type... etc..) and based on this input I could automatically determine which master file to use which would then setup all of the proper stuff! Presto.. one command and we've got total automation. I've only spent time on 3 different hardware types.. Dell Poweredge 2650, Dell Poweredge 2850 and a HP DL380. They all worked perfectly with this system and reimaged with RH40 from a single golden image. Unfortunately this is as far as I can take it for the moment until management has decided whether this is a better approach - they love scalability and this is what they fear most of this software. As a side-note, in my previous email I managed to integrate a SSH daemon into the imaging host to better troubleshoot issues during imaging, and I've also used the XML/LOG files of si_monitor to produce much the same thing as si_monitortk onto a web page (which refreshes every 30 seconds.) I've already shared the SSH daemon instructions and will share my code for the PHP enabled website to do monitoring from the web (although we currently do not have provisions for the Virtual Console in place yet - but do have plans to tie the SSH client into a java applet to connect to an imaging host from the web. We love centralizing things here!) and the ultimate plan being managing and monitoring all of this from a single web page. I've attached a small jpg of the web monitoring (very basic so far.) Let me know of any similar experiences you all may have had in relation to this! Cheers, Jason
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