[Gllug] Playing with a deployment idea - PXE, bittorrent, remote location

[Karanbir Singh]

Alan Peery wrote:
> Good morning all,
> 
>         I am playing with an idea.  If you want to deploy systems at a 
> (large) set of remote office, the following is a relatively straight 
> forward approach:
> 
>     * local PXE boot server serving images
>     * Linux distrib suitable for clients, modified to find local server
>       for yum/apt-get local repository

you mean something like cobbler ( http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/ )

>     * automatically scheduled daily updates from local repository
 >
>         Has anyone looked at a serverless variant of this?  Like this:
> 
>     * DHCP server directs client to PXE image across WAN
>     * client downloads very minimal distribution
>     * Bittorrent style download of remainder of distribution, source
>       limited to PXE server and bytes already on local network

if you have more than a couple of machines at the local site, it makes sense to 
just setup a local distro mirror in the remote network. if thats not practical, 
then perhaps use apt-cache somewhere within the network ? and/or just put the 
package cache ( like /var/cache/yum/<reponame>/ ) on a shared resource.

bittorrent, imho, is one of the worst ways to get system packages over.

>     * Later clients get all torrent bytes from local network for base OS
>     * One client becomes lead for torrenting patches down, other clients
>       in effect use it as a repository
> 
>        Has anyone experimented with something like this?

Lots of times, look at the yum and yum-devel lists, the idea has been brought up 
for atleast a few years now, but never got anywhere since most people just used 
the alternatives ways that exist now.

If package-size is an issue, package-delta-creation-and-shipping for most types 
of packaging systems are fairly stable and usable these days.

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq
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