Late reply time...
dminer wrote: >The usability issues with WAN installation are a priority to fix; our >current support for this is way too hard to set up on the server side. > >What I see is that there are tradeoffs to be made by each user. In >section 4.1.8 of the paper, I broke down the performance into three >broad categories, synopses of which were: > >1. download & burn media >2. start the installer and provide any inputs >3. lay down the bits and get them running > >A Sun-provided WAN installation service minimizes #1, while increasing >#3 (and perhaps #2); overall it should be the fastest option for a >single install, and as WAN speed and reliability increase it seems the >advantage will widen. Avoiding burning also minimizes #1 to some >extent. If you're going to do more than a one-off install, you're >better off creating a cache on the local LAN, so that you optimize #3. I agree that for wall-clock time, WAN installation should be fastest (for a single once-off install). For users who don't have an alternative machine they can use while installing Solaris, they are most likely to want to download Solaris in the background while using the machine - today they would download and burn to CD/DVD. In other words, what they care most about is system downtime, not end to end install time. WAN install could easily take 5 or more hours, unless they have unusually fast networking. I think this would be typical for someone installing at home - eg an enthusiast or developer without access to a spare machine they could use at work. In such cases, being able to install off an existing partition on the HD (or from compact flash) instead of DVD would be nice. btw, as a side-note, currently Solaris's installer doesn't seem to handle CD/DVD burn errors very well - if the checksums fail, it just seems to carry on. I've had this in the past, and a friend of mine got this recently when installing Solaris 10 for the first time. >> When you say "duty cycles for flash drives aren't quite up to hard >> drive standards", do you mean the number of re-writes Flash cells can >> handle without errors? If I recall correctly, Flash cells can >> generally handle many billion re-writes on average, and also has >> support for offlining groups of cells in a similar way to how hard >> discs handle bad sectors. Sounds like you have looked at this more >> closely than me though. btw, wouldn't ZFS's copy-on-write help a bit >> by spreading the writes around...? >> > >I can't say I've looked at it that closely, my info is secondhand. We >certainly have hot spots in the system which would make me skeptical >that it's a good idea right now. ZFS might help, I guess, though I >don't think it was explicitly designed for this purpose so it's more a >side-effect than intentional, and thus seems likely to not be completely >effective. Hmm, I note that Sun's new Netra CT900 has support for compact flash, but I can't seem to find more info. If it's good enough for 5-9s telco, it's probably good enough for general use. >> Certainly is tricky. And there's no "one size fits all" that's for >> sure. Maybe an early first question in an interactive installer >> should be "what is your general attitude towards security?" with >> options like "I want maximum ease of use", "a reasonable balance" and >> "paranoid" ^-^ (probably need more technical options). Those high >> level choices would then influence what's installed/activated, and >> maybe other things. >> > >Mostly, we want to find a way to not ask questions like that, because >they're either too vague and lead to not really achieving the user's >purpose, or too detailed and the ease-of-use just isn't there. But I'm >sure we'll end with some amount of dialog on some path to let users tune >this. Maybe an idea would be to flash up an image or two while early parts of the installer are running in the background (ie preparing the system or similar), to make more productive use of time the user would otherwise spend staring at the screen waiting for the install to get ready. That image would inform the user that various configuration options are available in the installer (security, what packages etc), and if they don't want a vanilla install, they should click on the "customize" button on the install screen when it appears in a few seconds. ie, inform users that various options are available but don't require any extra button clicks for vanilla installs. First time installers would be watching the screen so would notice such messages. More expert users would simply wait until the screen with the "customize" button appears. This message posted from opensolaris.org
