On Tue, 20 May 2008, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
I generally prefer to just bulk install boxes by PXE booting them though -- less handwork. That requires a bit more work, but any SA worth his salt knows how to do that sort of thing.
I agree that PXE is a powerful tool/methodology for scalable systems administration, although that isn't really orthogonal to a suitably designed flashdisk-bootable system.
Kickstart and similar tools have taken a lot of the pain out of doing mass installs, of course. It doesn't matter much if your boot media are hard drives or 4G flash cards -- it is pretty much the same, you just need to make sure you're not cramming too much stuff into the root file system. Hell, 4G used to be a pretty big hard drive, you don't even have to cram things in too badly if you're running some sort of Unix-alike...
Exactly. I have a 4GB Debian VM I run under VMware, and while I have almost 9GB installed on my primary toplevel F8 system (including vmware, not including the bootable images) the 4 GB system is actually more than enough to do all the work I need to do. Where I really look forward to "built-in" 4,8,16 GB systems is in two places. a) "Not-so-thin" desktop clients. No hard disk to fail. No need to set up or manage a server for full diskless, or a terminal server (lin or win) to run remote applications on. Even 4 GB is enough for nearly anything sane, and even a 16 GB flash is what, $100 extra in retail price at this point and dropping fast? 16 GB is enough for a kitchen-sink install plus 4 GB of personal home directory workspace, or for a base system and a couple of fairly full-featured VMs plus workspace. b) Laptops. I'd REALLY like a flash-driven laptop. I'd like a bootable OS on something pretty much completely shock-insensitive, preferrably with some serious disk recovery tools for the data disk (if any). I drop my laptops from table height (so far onto carpeted floor without any really bad result, fortunately) once every couple of years, and it's just a matter of time before I lose a disk when I do it. rgb
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