On Thu, 26 Feb 2009, David Mathog wrote:
There are a million distros, and many "small" distros, but these seem to
be optimized for desktop use. Surely there are a few out there that can
do the following:
1. pxe boot (easily)
2. autostart sshd, allowing root ssh login (there is no
keyboard on the remote machine).
3. contains smartmontools, parted, fdisk, etc., but not any desktop pieces.
I don't think it is fair to say that the mainstream distros are
optimized for desktop use. A package is a package. The only question
is the selection of packages installed. Kickstart in RH derived RHEL,
Fedora and Centos (at least) let one build-a-bear. The Base package
group contains a "basic unix" core, perhaps not as thin as one can make
it but thin enough (as thinness is really measured in terms of libraries
and network services -- installing software that might never be used is
irrelevant, given modern disk sizes). Then one can add whatever, GSL
libraries, MPI and/or PVM libraries and daemons. The final result is
condensed to a kickstart file, and a system PXE boots, installs itself,
reboots (possibly doing a final yum update, although as of F10 yum is
used for the base install and automatically picks up the updated RPMs,
halleleujah). I used to reinstall a cluster node as part of my standard
dog and pony show in my cluster room when visitors would take a tour --
if I started it and then began a spiel about what was happening, it
would finish just about as I finished my spiel (three or four minutes)
and reboot itself back to cluster node status as I wound up.
I'm guessing that Debian will do the same general thing with FAI. I
don't know about SuSE but probably. So end-use optimization is really a
matter of administrator choice. A previous physics admin even wrote
some Nifty Scripts that can id a PXE-booting system by DHCP matchup (MAC
address) and customize their kickstart pathway ON THE FLY -- custom
building a kickstart image and putting it into an end use category (such
as desktop workstation or cluster node) with its own special e.g. root
passwds etc.
rgb
I have been using boel and PLD for various maintenance tasks, but
neither one of these meets all of the criteria. boel is great for
running scripts, but here I want remote access to a command line. PLD
has all the tools, but at least on the target in question, it doesn't
start the network properly. (Also even if the network is manually
started, which does work, there is a password on root, and I don't know
what it is.) boel has an sshd binary, but so far I have not been able
to make it work automatically in a script. If anybody has, please share
those lines of code.
Thanks,
David Mathog
mat...@caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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