On Thu, 18 Oct 2007, Robert G. Brown wrote:
but on highly INhomogeneous hardware, slow and undependable networks, and the like -- if it dies
This discussion being on the beowulf list, I can agree with kickstart being used on INhomogenous hardware, but not on slow and undependable networks; how do you intend to run the cluster later with a crappy network ?
and checkpointing of some sort on the script(s) that finish off the system, so that if a particular package crashes the install one can just remove it from the list and restart the package list install to pick up where it left off and deal with the missing piece later
I think that this is a limitation in updating the RPM database; you make a transaction with a set of packages which has to have dependencies satisfied; if you want to eliminate one package you need to recompute the package set, as removing that one might remove many others pulled in through dependencies trees - so it's not so easily checkpointable.
Of course this requires a binary and configurational standard at LEAST through the base install (the kernel, glibc, /etc layout, more base-class libraries).
... and packaging. Each of these pieces comes from a package and whatever further-install program runs later will need to deal with other packages and should know about what is installed already. And that's where a big problem lies...
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