Date: Sat, 02 Oct 1999 09:25:46 +0200 From: Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za> To: Jeff Harris <jeff@dcnv.com> Cc: freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Help... heh. Message-ID: <199910020725.JAA54491@gratis.grondar.za>
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> 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. That is what NIS (AKA Yellow Pages) is good at. There is a good O'Reilly book on NIS/NFS. > 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. Look at the /etc/rc.diskless* stuff in FreeBSD. > 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. "Diskless" usually means "boots off network", not "has no disks whatsoever". > 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). Diskless is a good direction. It is a bit fiddly, but not too difficult, and works well once you get it up. (I last did it 4 years ago - I reckon it will be easier now). M -- Mark Murray Join the anti-SPAM movement: http://www.cauce.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message
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