From owner-freebsd-small Fri Oct 1 22:22: 3 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Received: from mail.dcnv.com (mail.dcnv.com [216.33.117.136]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D1E6D14DED for ; Fri, 1 Oct 1999 22:21:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jeff@mail.dcnv.com) Received: (from jeff@localhost) by mail.dcnv.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id AAA15563 for freebsd-small@freebsd.org; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 00:25:52 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from jeff) Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 00:25:52 -0500 From: Jeff Harris To: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Subject: Help... heh. Message-ID: <19991002002552.B15170@dcnv.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.4i Sender: owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Well, so I've been charged (well, okay, this is the way I want to do it), with making 100+ BSD-based machines all play server on our network, and it seems to me that installing freebsd onto all 100+ machines (We could easily scale to 500 or more) would make administrative duties a nightmare. So I thought, "What if all the machines just had a floppy in them, and they grabbed a root, usr, and var filesystem from the boot server(s), grabbed a dynamic ip address, booted up, used a local disk as swap, and loaded freebsd into a large-ish ramdisk." This way they could just be rebooted to install an upgraded software base, etc. The machines in question are big pIII/500's with 1gig+ of ram each, 100mbit ethernet, etc. They're fast. My question is, where do I start looking for info. I've seen lots of diskless stuff (well, okay, a few things) but these machines aren't totally diskless. They at least have a floppy. Anyone have any tips or pointers on where to look at? I think this is the direction I should move, as opposed to loading fbsd on each machine, running cvsup's on all of them and ssh'ing into each one to do a make world (or at least make installworld), and rsyncing our software (which is only apache-based). Anyways... Thanks, if anyone can help.. :) --- Jeff Harris - DigitalConvergence.Com jeff@dcnv.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message