Andrea Righi wrote: > Paul Greidanus wrote: > >> * - Ok, it's "possible" but it's hugely hackish.. i.e. you can use the >> autoinstall script to dd out a disk image onto a raw partition, but it's >> not likely to be very effective. Or you could use something like ghost, >> and image it that way, but again, hack. >> > > The "raw partition copy" has never been the preferred approach in SystemImager > (for a lot of reasons), but it could be an interesting path to explore. > > With raw partition copies (I've in mind something a little bit more structured > than an ugly hack) we could easily implement the support for many currently > unsupported OSes: Solaris, Windows, *BSD, ... we could always use a Linux > installing system (the well-tested BOEL kernel + initrd.img approach) to image > the clients with different OSes and write images using a simple "dd". And all > the currently available transports to download the images from the image > server > could be used at zero-cost. For example the integration with the BitTorrent > transport would be really simple: actually BitTorrent supports only regular > files (and directories) and an image generated by a raw partition copy *is* a > regular file. > > The problems come when we need to do something *inside* the image at the end > of > the imaging process, for example the generation of a random SID for Windows > clients, the network configuration, etc. Moreover there is the heterogeneity > problem: the "raw copy" approach probably will not work with clients that > have a > different hardware. > > Well, just some thoughts for the future... > > I wonder if, in developing ways to image os.* it would make sense to have a raw partition copy as a fallback catch-all, and then allow some sort of modularization and abstraction layer that would allow modules for different OSes that can do things more sanely? i.e. a solaris module would allow flar, or rsync installs, and allows si_updateclient after it's installed..
All of this could most likely be done by using the standard linux/boel set.. but it's possible that even this could be changed, if needed, so that you can use the pxelinux menus to select a different boot kernel? although, this might be pulling farther away from systemimager then we would want to. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ sisuite-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-users
