Re: "kickstart" for debian needed

2001-03-28 Thread Magni Onsøien
On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 09:58:27PM -0800, Duane Powers said:

> I'm considering dd as one alternative, but that's kinda bulky 'cuz it
> requires physically removing each hard drive installing in "parent" and
> imaging... I've looked at things like
> ghost, but that doesn't seem to be an option... I know we've had this
> discussion on the list before... I don't know if anyone has the details
> on redhat's kickstart program,
> and whether that is something that could be ported to debian... Any
> suggestions?

I just got an UGLY idea... what about making a HUGE rpm with a
complete Debian-install, with the configuration either as commands in
the Deian-package (as little interactivity as possible) or as
postinst-commands in the RPM-package or in the postinst-section of
kickstart, and then install this debian-2.2.i386.rpm (etc) vai
kickstart.

Yes, this IS ugly, and I don't know if it will work. But it's dfinitely
a dirty hack :)

I have been working quite a lot with kickstart recently and it's a nice
tool. The mkkickstart-command that comes with RH 6.2 is however useless
and with lots of errors. Read the HOWTO instead.

> Most (of our) engineers are not linux-compliant.

Kickstart is not very easy to tweak, since the doc is poor, but if you
understand the basics it's easy. Once it's set up, it requires no
knowledge to use for installation and rather little knowledge to add
packages etc.

> May need to be reinstalled occassionally due to high tech network
> engineers hosing
> various applications (these are going to be workstations, not servers...
> accessed frequently by different users... stuff will get broken)

Either don't give them root on their boxes - they and install on their
homedirectories - or make sure they ONLY install stuff on /usr/local or
something.  Or reinstall every week, our reinstallation takes some 7
minutes (via NFS on a fast LAN) and requires one floppy (the green one).

But those hints on kickstart are rather RedHat-specific. I wouldn't
recommend someone porting kickstart to Debian. It sucks, some fighting
makes it suck less, but it's still ugly. But Debian really needs
something similar. For me Debian is my choice when it comes to my desktop
PC or a single server, but when installing more than one server that
should be identical, I need a kickstart tool and since Debian doesn't
have it and RedHat does...well.

Requirements:
- simple and liberal configfile (i.e. no strict, or at least
  non-logical, requirements about the order in the config file)
- installation methods: ftp, http, NFS (or doesn't Debian support that
  at all?), CD
- network config: dhcp, static
- no interactivity required, all info must/can be given in the
  configfile

If someone are interested in making such a thing or if someone are
actually working on it now, I'd be happy to know and maybe contribute (I
don't program, but I think I may have some skills on other areas anyway
:))


-- 
Magni Onsøien Initio IT-løsninger AS
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://www.initio.no/
Tlf. 73 83 71 71/928 10 269




Re: "kickstart" for debian needed

2001-03-28 Thread Magni Onsøien

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 09:58:27PM -0800, Duane Powers said:

> I'm considering dd as one alternative, but that's kinda bulky 'cuz it
> requires physically removing each hard drive installing in "parent" and
> imaging... I've looked at things like
> ghost, but that doesn't seem to be an option... I know we've had this
> discussion on the list before... I don't know if anyone has the details
> on redhat's kickstart program,
> and whether that is something that could be ported to debian... Any
> suggestions?

I just got an UGLY idea... what about making a HUGE rpm with a
complete Debian-install, with the configuration either as commands in
the Deian-package (as little interactivity as possible) or as
postinst-commands in the RPM-package or in the postinst-section of
kickstart, and then install this debian-2.2.i386.rpm (etc) vai
kickstart.

Yes, this IS ugly, and I don't know if it will work. But it's dfinitely
a dirty hack :)

I have been working quite a lot with kickstart recently and it's a nice
tool. The mkkickstart-command that comes with RH 6.2 is however useless
and with lots of errors. Read the HOWTO instead.

> Most (of our) engineers are not linux-compliant.

Kickstart is not very easy to tweak, since the doc is poor, but if you
understand the basics it's easy. Once it's set up, it requires no
knowledge to use for installation and rather little knowledge to add
packages etc.

> May need to be reinstalled occassionally due to high tech network
> engineers hosing
> various applications (these are going to be workstations, not servers...
> accessed frequently by different users... stuff will get broken)

Either don't give them root on their boxes - they and install on their
homedirectories - or make sure they ONLY install stuff on /usr/local or
something.  Or reinstall every week, our reinstallation takes some 7
minutes (via NFS on a fast LAN) and requires one floppy (the green one).

But those hints on kickstart are rather RedHat-specific. I wouldn't
recommend someone porting kickstart to Debian. It sucks, some fighting
makes it suck less, but it's still ugly. But Debian really needs
something similar. For me Debian is my choice when it comes to my desktop
PC or a single server, but when installing more than one server that
should be identical, I need a kickstart tool and since Debian doesn't
have it and RedHat does...well.

Requirements:
- simple and liberal configfile (i.e. no strict, or at least
  non-logical, requirements about the order in the config file)
- installation methods: ftp, http, NFS (or doesn't Debian support that
  at all?), CD
- network config: dhcp, static
- no interactivity required, all info must/can be given in the
  configfile

If someone are interested in making such a thing or if someone are
actually working on it now, I'd be happy to know and maybe contribute (I
don't program, but I think I may have some skills on other areas anyway
:))


-- 
Magni Onsøien Initio IT-løsninger AS
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://www.initio.no/
Tlf. 73 83 71 71/928 10 269


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Re: pop3 and Maildir

2001-02-15 Thread Magni Onsøien
On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 03:28:07PM +0100, Roger Abrahamsson said:
> Well, all I've seen is that the qmail system seems to be an integrated
> package. We here are also looking into switching to maildirs, and
> courier-imap seems very nice, especially with mysql authentication. Latest
> upstream courier-imap also have a pop3 server with it, but sofar I have
> not succeded in getting mysql support compiled in. If anyone has knowledge
> of how to get this working on a debian system I would be very happy.

We are probably going to use Courier 1.3.1 on a new system. However, our
problem is that we want to use LDAP for authetication and we have to
use OpenLDAP 2 (LDAP v3) because of the rest of the system.
Unfortunately Courier can't authenticate with OpenLDAP 2 (only 1). So,
now I'm wondering if someone has used Courier IMAP with authentication
through OpenLDAP 2 and if so, if the patch or extra module is or can be
made available?

TIA.


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[EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://www.initio.no/
Tlf. 73 83 71 71/928 10 269




Re: pop3 and Maildir

2001-02-15 Thread Magni Onsøien

On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 03:28:07PM +0100, Roger Abrahamsson said:
> Well, all I've seen is that the qmail system seems to be an integrated
> package. We here are also looking into switching to maildirs, and
> courier-imap seems very nice, especially with mysql authentication. Latest
> upstream courier-imap also have a pop3 server with it, but sofar I have
> not succeded in getting mysql support compiled in. If anyone has knowledge
> of how to get this working on a debian system I would be very happy.

We are probably going to use Courier 1.3.1 on a new system. However, our
problem is that we want to use LDAP for authetication and we have to
use OpenLDAP 2 (LDAP v3) because of the rest of the system.
Unfortunately Courier can't authenticate with OpenLDAP 2 (only 1). So,
now I'm wondering if someone has used Courier IMAP with authentication
through OpenLDAP 2 and if so, if the patch or extra module is or can be
made available?

TIA.


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[EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://www.initio.no/
Tlf. 73 83 71 71/928 10 269


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Re: mail sorting tool

2001-01-08 Thread Magni Onsøien

On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 03:45:25PM +0100, Toni Mueller whispered:

> - It's unavailable, basically. While anyone with their pretty
>   Linux or BSD box has no problems getting at appropriate UUCP
>   software, everyone else has to go to their nearest computer
>   museum to find one, as it seems. Also, customers usually can't
>   administrate neither SMTP nor UUCP, but SMTP is easier to
>   set up.

We administer an uucp-server for a major ISP here in Norway. It runs
FreeBSD with Taylor UUCP and works pretty well. A very few clients run
Linux in the other end, the wast majority runs Win NT with a product
called Omnigate Pro. There are about 300 UUCP users, and usually
everything works just fine. I'll estimate we (we act as 3rd line
support, but it looks like we get all the UUCP cases...) get about one
support case every day in average, most of them are because of huge
mails (that often are not sent completely because the line (isdn/modem)
went down before the mail was transfered, then the mail was sent again
and again and again and no other mail could get through the line..).
NThis is really a bug in Omnigate, I think, but I don't think it's too
bad concidering there are about 300 users and most of the errors seem to
be the same clients having problems with huge mails...


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