[Gllug] Restoring and installing machines

[John Hearns]

Tushars talk also made me think of:

Mondo Rescue
http://www.mondorescue.org/

When setting up a new server, all you need do is put in a CD (or two) or 
a writeable DVD. The state of the system is snapshotted to a bootable 
rescue disk. If the system is stolen, hacked or otherwise not working 
etc. all you do is boot from this DVD and the system re-installs itself.
In the jargon, "bare metal recovery" and for free.
http://www.mondorescue.org/about.shtml


For installing multiple machines there are lots of ways of achieving 
this. That's me climbing onto my hobby horse here.
Most, if not all, of the automated solutions depend on PXE booting over 
the network, so it is worth a glance at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Boot_Execution_Environment

Most modern motherboards will have the BIOS option to enable a network 
boot. Something like 'Enable Option ROM" or LAN boot enable etc.
Once you have enabled this, power cycle the machine and go into the BIOS 
again. In the Boor Order page change the order till the LAN boot option 
is above the hard drive.
On older motherboards, you may have to create a boot floppy. You can 
Google for how to do this. Boot from floppy, and then the workstation 
will request a PXE boot via its network card.

The wise person will note down the MAC address of each workstation as it 
  requests its DHCP lease. There are various ways to do this 
automagically on the server though.

For the install, there is of course SuSE Autoyast and Redhat Kickstart.
For Deboan types there is FAI http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/


For a set of workstations, I would recommend looking at Systemimager

http://www.systemimager.org/
"SystemImager makes it easy to do automated installs (clones), software 
distribution, content or data distribution, configuration changes, and 
operating system updates to your network of Linux machines. You can even 
update from one Linux release version to another!

Some typical environments include: Internet server farms, database 
server farms, high performance clusters, computer labs, and corporate 
desktop environments."

If you don't want to use PXE booting, Systemimager uses its own boot 
floppies of boot CD-ROMs as an alternative.









-- 
      John Hearns
      Senior HPC Engineer
      Streamline Computing,
      The Innovation Centre, Warwick Technology Park,
      Gallows Hill, Warwick CV34 6UW
      Office: 01926 623130 Mobile: 07841 231235
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