brossard@sasun1.epfl.ch ("(Alain Brossard EPFL-SIC/SII)") (03/06/91)
Archive-name: sys/sun/brossard-sun-install/0--
Archive: ltisun.epfl.ch:/pub/install.4.1.1.Z [128.178.119.94]
Original-posting-by: brossard@sasun1.epfl.ch ("(Alain Brossard EPFL-SIC/SII)")
Original-subject: Summary: remote install of 4.1.1
Reposted-by: emv@ox.com (Edward Vielmetti)
There has been a lot of interest in the way I bring up 4.1.1 on
remote machines (without cd-drives). It took me this long to reasonably
test everything and to stop adding features.
In this document, I'll try to
describe everything I did. It does look long and it did take me
a while to implement, but the result is definitely worth it. You
will want to modify the scripts for your own setup.
But first a quick summary:
We have 3 cd-drives and about 150 machines on campus. The main
idea is to have the cd-drives centraly located and have all the other
machines use them remotely but (and this is the catch) without having
to go through the hassle of setting up diskless clients all over the place.
I also tried to preserve security whenever I could and took advantage
of the fact that suninstall was running under the control of my
script to include all the security fix I know about, to fix up
rc*, to put in DNS, dynamically linked mount and rcp and so on.
At the time I installed 4.1.1 on my machine, I added (using suninstall)
4 diskless clients, one per architecture, called epflsun3, epflsun3x, ...
I then copied a few files over from the miniroot (among which suninstall :-)
over to my /export hierarchy. When we want to bring up a machine to 4.1.1,
I run a script on my machine setting bootparams, permissions and so on:
about 60 seconds in all and the remote machine can then boot diskless from
mine. Once booted, no need to copy the miniroot, just run suninstall et
voila!
In fact, suninstall can be run remotely since we are running multi-user
and since the cd-drive can accomodate more than one user, we are
not limited to upgrading one machine at a time.
We still haven't received our official tapes and documentation of 4.1.1,
so the following was done without any documentation.
This document and assorted scripts and tar files can be found
by anonymous ftp on the machine ltisun.epfl.ch (128.178.119.94) under
the install.4.1.1.Z. I describe each part of my "distribution" at
the end of this document and in the file README.
I'll be updating the copy on ltisun as improvements are made
and eventually submit to whole package to comp.sys.sun to be archived.
[340 lines of installation instructions deleted. --Ed]