On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Forrest Aldrich wrote:
> I was also curious about what people do to keep a fleet of FreeBSD machines
> up-to-date with CVSup and buildworld. I can't imagine manually going to
> more than 100 machines and doing the same thing manually... how time consuming.
>
> To summarize again, we are deploying status monitoring machines into POPs,
> across the US. Those machines are identical in terms of hardware, et
> al. We were hoping to find a means by which to streamline the installation
> process, such that we could create (say) custom boot floppies where you'd
> input minimum information (IP address, hostname, domain, etc.) and it would
> then go off and perform the installation (from fdisk, newfs... to editing
> packet filters appropriately, which make require a "template" of sorts).
If the job they are doing is fairly simple, and they have (or could
have) plenty of RAM, have you considered scrapping the disc drives and
having a CD-boot system?
Although CD drives are not very reliable for heavy-duty use, you should be
able to arrange that the working set gets loaded at start-up and the CD is
then idle in all normal use - this may "just work" through normal caching,
or you may need to copy active files onto an MFS filesystem (you'll need
an MFS for various things anyhow). This has the advantage over pico-BSD
style installations that you can fill the rest of the CD with a fairly
complete FreeBSD installation: in normal use the CD drive is idle, but
you have the full set of tools available for use on rare occasions when
they are needed.
Obviously the machines need to pick up their identities from somewhere, as
you want to just duplicate a stack of identical CDs. If the machines can
rely on their environment, DHCP is the obvious way to go; if not, one
technique I've used is to key it on the MAC address of the ethernet card
(in /etc/rc I pick up the MAC address with ifconfig and then have a big
case statement to set up the different characteristics of the machines).
Obviously this doesn't suit every application, but I have found it highly
advantageous when I want to put down a BSD machine in a location with no
local BSD skills to fix things if they go wrong.
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