[WBEL-users] system imager

[Kirby C. Bohling]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 02:29:45PM -0400, Aaron C wrote:
> I've been poking around for a good solution for creating templates/images
> for my servers, and I was hoping to get some feedback from the list on what
> other people use, specifically for building multiple identical Whitebox
> machines running software RAID.  The two main packages I've looked at are
> systemimager and partimage.

I do it a completely different way.  Depending on your needs, this
might or might not work.  There are several schools of thought on
this.  I personally, use kickstart to do installs.  At the end of a
kickstart install you can have it run a script.  I then script every
single customization I do to the machine.

You can do RAID, you can do LVM, you can do whatever you want.  If
you are good with sed/awk/perl/shell/diff/patch, and know your
commands you can go a long way towards getting this done.  One of
the things I really like about it, is that it is documentation to
precisely how the machine was configured when it rolled off the end
of the assembly line.

I configure our LDAP auth, our sendmail to be smart hubs, turn off
all the services, add the printers, harden the various services,
install our monitoring and backup clients, set various UI tweaks
(set -o vi), modify /etc/skel, point yum at a local yum repo.  All
that is done thru a bit of scripting.

Plus it's a real install.  So if the installer does anything
differently because you are installing onto different hardware that
gets handled (so your modules are correct if you have different
sound/network/whatever).  You get different private SSH keys. 
Plus, if you do it correctly, it'll automatically get all of the
updates applied that are available (yum -y update is the last
command I run).

I've had very good luck with it.  One of the nice things is that
it's also very portable from RHEL to WBEL to CentOS.  So if you
decide to switch up, you don't lose all of your custom
configuration.  It's less portable from RHEL 3 -> 4, but mainly
that's because a lot of how configuration changes are made has
changed.

So if you are interested in having a machines start from a common
base, and then get minor tweaks based on what it is for.  Then
kickstart might be for you.  The think I like most about it, is that
it's a CD or network boot and 20 minutes from being done on modern
hardware. 

If you have identical hardware, that you want to be bit for bit
identical.  This probably isn't for you.  If you are tired of making
the same dozen tweaks to a box before you set it up for a
specialized task, kickstart is something you should consider.

    Kirby