On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 12:45:53PM -0500, Eric Thibodeau wrote: > PXE-boot even for the Master?...so where do the images reside... The PXE env resides on an install server, that's used for all of the machines in the network (not just the cluster). (It serves up SUSE's AutoYAST for our desktops, and a few different GLI profiles for our other servers).
> how do you manage the slightly varying config items such as hostname > and all? hostname is taken from DHCP directly. dhcpcd -H. The other slightly varying stuff is done with a postinstall script run by the installer (the current script is under 100 lines). > This approach still seems a little bit time consuming since all nodes > are still individual entities (not NFS roots to a single maintained > image). Though granted that the nodes being all identical, emerge -K > should in theory be a breeze....but it's not the case for maintaining > all the config files consistent. Use INSTALL_MASK=/etc after the install is completed and propagate config files manually (well triggerable command connecting to a local rsync server). We also make use of LDAP for authentication. > So switching a machine's purpose/profile requires a complete > re-install on the node? Yes, but I'm talking about radical alterations here. Eg we've got a binary app that needs the system compiled with gcc-3.3. It doesn't work if glibc or a few other things are compiled with gcc-3.4 or newer. > You state 20 minutes for re-installing, is it > a _real_ install Full GLI install, extract stage, portage tree, emerge -K all needed packages. If you want to make each node compile everything, it's about an hour on the nodes (they are pretty speedy boxes). > or the dump of a "reference" root? (Pardon my > ignorance of the CLI installer you are referring to... I'll read the > http link you'll send me ;) ) Look for GLI first of all. It's the Gentoo installer. It has a number of frontend modes - GTK, Dialog, and CLI. The CLI is entirely non-interactive. > Actually, I would have thought you use _one_ node to compile the packages > (using distcc at your description) and _then_ propagate the package onto the > other nodes with -K....still, I would think maintaining an NFS mounted ROOT > would be less cumbersome.... I do compile the packages on a single node. I was mainly pointing out a danger in using -k due to Portage not use lockfiles the binpkgs presently. -- Robin Hugh Johnson E-Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG FP : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85
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