Re: Installing Multiple OS on a Blade Farm

Moe Trin wrote:
On 31 May 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.setup, in
article <1149086420.040033.116040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
IceWookie@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I have some HP blades that I need to setup. The tricky part is that
I need to install one of several operating systems on these
(Fedora/CentOS, Windows 2K3, Solaris 10, FreeBSD). Since I can boot
off of a USB device, I was hoping that a solution exists that would
enable me to:
- dump ISOs on to a USB-connected hard drive
- create a pick-list of OSs available on the drive
- have some sort of daemon tools like utility which would mount the
appropriate ISO and start installing the OS.

How often are you going to be swapping O/S on a given box? Are you

Don't use an ISO. Use a disk image, or a tarball, and do it from a network
kickstart system: it's one heck of a lot faster than doing the install every
time.


Has anyone seen this sort of thing?

No, but as you are posting from windoze, perhaps you are familiar with
Norton Ghost. That might be a more suitable solution.

I've written network and CD tarball OS installers: they're pretty easy to
do, even for Windows OS images if you use a Linux boot loader or have good
tools to set up booting, such as Norton Ghost to make Windows disk images.
(NTFS isn't easily tar-ballable, but there are tools to turn a FAT32
fileystem into NTFS at boot time for Windows.)

The advantage of this technique is that the files on the fileserver
are kept up to date, and thus there is no need to install, and then
connect to an update server to (effectively) reinstall a bunch of
files/packages.

The CD or USB device can do the kickstart: I've written tools like that.

The script is proprietary, but someone with reasonable scripting
skills should be able to create it based on the above description.

Agreed: I've done it for roughly 15,000 systems in my career.


.

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