On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 09:03:10PM +0100, Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote: > I have no proof that AI will be better than jumpstart; the people > designing don't even know how people use jumpstart. The AI documents > alone are a proof of that. This is all sounds like designing from an > ivory tower. if you have not installed 100s of systems with jumpstart, > and run those systems in production (i.e., it wasn't some lab exercise at > Sun), then you're probably not the right person to redesign jumpstart.
I don't know about AI and ivory towers, but I agree with the rest of your comment and would like to validate it with a tale from the past. In a previous life I've built tools around jumpstart to automate the concurrent installation of as many clients as the network will handle. Which means: *ZERO* interaction. The user makes gives the tool a list of hostnames and off it goes. This tool took care of installing packages appropriate to the host type, and it took care of kicking off "boot net - install" via a terminal server. It supported jumpstart-in- the-rack and jumpstart-in-the-lab (the first wave of servers had to be installed before the network was available in their racks -- it was a brand new site). I'm glossing over a lot of details, obviously. What matters is it was simpler to install hundreds of customized hosts with this tool than with JumpStart unmodified. One reason I built such a tool: when I did it we needed to install some 600 systems in a short period of time, and the idea of interacting with add_install_client 600 times was out of the question -- it's too error prone, and anyways just painful. Another reason: I wanted to be able to re-install everything in a flash if we had to, the sort of thing one might have to do in case of a disaster (think 9/11), which never goes as planned. > To take existing software is sometime hard to develop it further. > > However, continue to use existing software and developing has two huge > benefits: > > - it helps the current customers to take our new release > - it helps us fixing bugs in the current release > > When you develop from tabula rasa you lose that; your end result must make > up for that. I'm not seeing that. I agree. > Here's what I predict: someone will install OpenSolaris using the start > and finish scripts from Solaris 10 because "AI doesn't do what I want". > Because it can. Heh. Nico --
