-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Sounds like a good idea to me.
Josh On Tuesday January 19, 2010, Andy Kurth wrote: > I'd like to propose a design change for the modularized backend code. The > provisioning modules (xCAT.pm, vmware.pm, etc) are currently responsible > for monitoring and waiting for the computer's OS to respond after an image > has been loaded. It would be better if this task were handled by the OS > modules because the sequence of things to monitor and the appropriate > timeouts vary widely among OS's. > > This will solve a problem currently affecting Windows Server 2008, Vista, > and most likely 2007. Sysprep's mini-setup phase takes a horrendously long > time with the newer OS's compared to XP and 2003. This is causing timeouts > to be reached before Sysprep is done. There is currently no way to specify > longer timeouts for the newer versions of Windows without having it apply > to all OS's. Having the OS module monitor and wait for the computer to > respond would solve this problem. > > To accomplish this, the waiting/monitoring responsibility would be moved to > the post_load() subroutine in the OS module and new.pm will keep track of > the install attempt count, passing it to load() and post_load(). The > sequence is: 1. new.pm calls $provisioner->load($install_attempt) > 2. new.pm calls $os->post_load($install_attempt) > > The return value sent back to the new.pm module by the provisioning > module's load() subroutine would be: > 1: computer is done being loaded and ready for OS post_load() > 0: error occurred, attempt image load again > undefined: error occurred, don't attempt load again > > The return value sent back to new.pm from the OS module's post_load() would > be: 1: computer OS is configured and ready for a reservation > 0: error occurred, attempt image load again > undefined: error occurred, don't attempt load again > > Having new.pm keep track of the attempt count and pass it to the load() and > post_load() subroutines allows them to be able to use this value to adjust > their timeouts and return values if appropriate. > > This will also remove the SSH dependency from the provisioning modules. > There was a thread a few months ago about supporting methods other than SSH > to control computers. This will facilitate that feature. > > I created VCL-291 and will begin to work on this. Please reply if you have > any thoughts or suggestions. > > Thanks, > Andy - -- - ------------------------------- Josh Thompson Systems Programmer Advanced Computing | VCL Developer North Carolina State University [email protected] 919-515-5323 my GPG/PGP key can be found at pgp.mit.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFLVfiyV/LQcNdtPQMRAqVuAJ9inngb+CNv8VsWLj9yJ/2GJBlu2QCfT5Qz /uKWNBNsRHOiubWr1bRGry4= =nwRt -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
