On 9/29/06, Romanowski, John (OFT) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Has anyone implemented Rob van der Heij's idea about a read-only-dasd rescue system that run's from ramdisk? I don't want to reinvent the wheel if someone's documented how they did it.
We did not finish that work because we found in our shop the approach of linking to the dead penguin's disks much more attractive for various reasons. With the SuSE starter system you have most of it. You can use zipl to write the kernel image, parmfile and initrd to a small disk. If you IPL that you get the "install" starter system. The rest of it would be in /linuxrc and maybe some packages you must add to the initrd. The biggest hurdle in the system's self-configuring is getting the IP configuration. Once you have that you can go to LDAP or even do a wget against a web server to get all the details. We have discussed on the list various ways to do that. What I used myself was a separate "service" guest LAN that each server couples to. On that guest LAN you run your own virtual DHCP server that uses a fixed table to assign IP address based on the MAC address in the directory. In theory it should be good enough to have a fixed IP address for the penguin in rescue mode (do you really expect to run several in rescue mode at the same time). However, we learned that the YaST configuration was not really designed towards an approach where you have a different network location during system installation. To have a separate service IP address seems to be a good alternative if you want to avoid connecting the system to the bad Internet while you're still doing the install and testing things. Rob ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
