> Thank you for the insight into your environment. > . Out of curiosity, > what kind of data store is your central configuration > management? Can you > generate the XML AI manifests out of it? > One way, which I think is neat, is to use an XML > L file of machine > data then, via XSLT, automatically generate AI > manifests without much > scripting and allowing one to generate manifests > against the latest AI > manifest format automatically too.
We're using a system created by Casper Dik around 15 years ago. I needed to document how we use it so that I could determine how to build a similar system for Opensolaris. The configuration is all defined on an NFS-mounted filesystem. This is mounted on the install client by the Jumpstart finish script, which also copies files and does other changes directed by the central configuration. After installation, the same NFS-mounted filesystem is used to make post-install changes by verifying against the central configuration database. That was the big advantage: to be able to configure a host during installation, and then to be able to do it at any time later, based on the same database. Doing it at install time is easy. Doing it later is more difficult, but equally important. I haven't investigated AI manifests, but I suspect that we'd be relying mostly on the hostname to specify the configuration. We really need classes as well. Of course, we also need to adjust the configuration from time to time after installation. I'm assuming that for now I'd just need to build a service that runs a finish script. Doing it at the end of the install would be best, but doing it during the first boot would be acceptable. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
