Hi Sundar, > The automated installer uses three kinds of manifests as of 09/06 > release. They are sysmap (or criteria) manifest, install (or AI) > manifest and system configuration manifest. The purpose of these > manifests are as follows: > > The install manifest is an XML document that defines the client > installation. It contains disk target, partition and slice operations, > IPS repository selection etc. The SC manifest or system configuration > manifest contains the information needed to configure the system after > installation is completed. This contains IP address, user account, > time zone etc. The criteria manifest associate the AI manifest and the > SC manifest with a client. > > The 09/06 release provides a default manifest for each service. The > users can add custom manifests and associate a client based on MAC > address, IP address, memory, and architecture. > > Jack worked on the manifest inter-file functional specification. The > discussion about criteria manifest helped us to realize that it is > very complicated and difficult to understand. > > I would like to propose removing criteria manifest from AI and keep > only install manifest and SC manifest for the following reasons: > - The client specific setup is done in two places. First to associate > a service, the user needs to do 'installadm create-client' and to > associate a manifest, the user needs to add a custom manifest with MAC > address of the client as the criteria. We can combine service and > manifest association in one command if the criteria manifest is > removed from the manifest. > - Removing criteria manifest reduces the type of manifests the user > needs to manage from three manifests to two manifests and improve user > experience with AI > > One potential disadvantage is that the proposal will remove some > functionality. Currently the users can use different criteria other > than MAC address or combine multiple criteria to customize the > environment. This feature is not used by many because of the > complexity of setting up custom manifests. The derived manifests can > be used in some of those cases. >
Hi Sundar, Some comments/questions: 1. Would it be possible to have a default, null, criteria even for a client-specific setup? So, we would still be able to use one command in most cases. Also, couldn't we still make this one command even if there is a criteria manifest? 2. My concern about relying on derived manifests to do the additional client specific mapping, for things outside of mac addr, is that requires the users to write scripts to get the data on the client. Some users may not want to do that. I guess I am not clear what we are trying to solve with this proposal. Is it the difficulty using the criteria manifest, the users having to run more than one command to setup a client-specific service? Both? I don't recall what Jack's proposal about inter-manifest organization said regarding the criteria manifest? Is this part of his plan? thanks, sarah ***** > Please send your feedback about the proposal. > > Thanks, > Sundar > _______________________________________________ > caiman-discuss mailing list > caiman-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss
