On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 12:02:36PM -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote:
Comments? Questions?
Well I agree with the previous commenter, who considered it complicated.
What I've done for one of my customer's imaging needs is to create an
image of a system using tar (which isn't perfect, I know) plus the
partitioning information. I would then load a special cobbler
profile which involved a "stub" OS image, which contained a script to
run at boot which would find the stored image, tar it onto the disk,
fix up the grub so that it booted the correct partitions in the right
way, and then rebooted.
This was limited to restoring images that were previously taken from
the same system due to what could be charitably called a wide variety
of hardware, but I don't doubt that someone clever could make the
post-install (or firstboot) more flexible to make it deal with different
hardware.
I always thought that a better way to do it would be to put all that
into a specially crafted %PRE script and not bother with the stub,
but never found the time to get it done myself. And since we have an
already working PXE-based installer environment, why bother with the
LiveCD?
I implemented a variation of this for my Sun Solaris systems -- a
special Jumpstart profile which instead of running the installer
would partition the disk and install a (ufsdump-sourced) image and
made the disk bootable; Solaris' built-in flexibility and relative
hardware homogenity made this easier to make work across different
machine types.
All that said, I am perhaps not the target for cobbler; the
increasing power of cobbler et al is far beyond my needs, as I've not
really changed how I've been doing things since 0.3.3 when I started
using it.
--
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/ /()\ \ David Mackintosh |
dave(a)xdroop.com |
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