On Thu, 21 May 2009, Obiozor Okeke wrote:
Hi Diana (and Stuart) thanks for all your advice. The problem or nut we're trying to crack is that we're trying to deploy OpenBSD to remote clients and we wanted an inexpensive but very high reliability system with the flexibility to change configurations (switch in/out different VMs) and add/modify services remotely on-the-fly. For example we could upgrade a client from 4.A4 to 4.5 along with all the custom apps and client data packaged in a VM. We would grab the old 4.4 VM bring it back to our lab, then upgrade and re-configure it the way we wanted to and drop it back on the ESXi. Then just change the network configs and switch the old for the new all remotely without ever visiting the client Thanks again all.
If you want to stick with the Soekris you might want to consider basing your solution on flashboot, http://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/flashboot/2009-May/000223.html . Using a CF with multiple partitions would allow you to upgrade remotely the flashboot kernel. Of course this would take some work to fine tune the upgrade procedure to minimize failure mechanisms. diana
