Re: dzinstall 1.0.40
>
> The powerpc boot floppies don't build nicely, and it's pretty fruitless
> trying to boot some PowerMacs off floppies anyway, due to hardware bugs
> and limitations. I think I'll stick to i386 and sparc. Almost by
> definition, you ought to be able to do a completely automated install on a
> sparc box, just by typing boot net at the firmware prompt. On PCs, you
> have a lot more trouble "detecting" hardware.
>
> I don't think it would be very hard at all to patch the installer such
> that it read its configuration from some file on the network or the floppy
> and bypasses any configuration questions answered in the file (hostname,
> IP address, root password hash, network interface, router). System
> identification is trivial compared with what comes next. You'll want a
> network readable file with a bunch of key value pairs in it, giving you a
> fallthrough list:
>
> ip 131.111.229.51 route2 postinst.route2
> hostname arthur1 atk_box atk_script
> arch ppc mac_conf
> arch sparc sun_conf
> * * default.conf
>
> You go down the list until you match one of the lines, and use the file or
> files mentioned in the third and fourth fields as your configuration file
> and postinstallation script.
dzinstall already does this, not in the exact way you have proposed but with
similar results. It searches the following install configuration files:
defaults
<configname>.config
<hostname>.config
<ipaddr>.config
in the following directories:
<rootdisk>/ect/install
<floppy>/install
<source>/install
and, only for the essential missing variables, it prompts the user or use
some reasonable program default. Each configuration file can override any
variable defined in previous files.
> All these files are in the same directory and presumably readable by HTTP
> or NFS or something, and detail which packages to install, and how to
> repartition the hard drives. You'll need to write a smart program to call
> fdisk automaticly (and repartition the drive based on instructions in the
Already done. The packages can be defined in profile and task files. The
automatic fdisk repartitioning is already working but the logic behind it is
very primitive. If someone can write a good repartitioning algorithm it would
be welcome. It should handle also the automatic resizing of the single vfat
partition created by windows, which unfortunately is a very commom case.
Anyway as a last resort you can always partition the disk yourself and then
run dzinstall specifying the root and swap partitions.
> profile files above). With Debian we're lucky that the "where are my
> packages located on the network and how do I get them onto the disk"
> question is blown away completely by apt. The bad news is that configuring
> said packages automatically is not something for which the tools are
> finished yet, so autoinstall sanity is not with us yet (I managed a few
> Solaris reinstalls over the network - no physical access required - one
> day, Debian installs will be this effortless)
The bad news is that nobody really cares about the automatic installation.
I'm installing and configuring automatically debian systems from months now,
but it seems that everyone else prefer the `hacker' masochistic way to do it.
> It seems (from my week-long attempt to get them to compile) that the
> boot-floppies are rather trashed ATM, and that adding this netautoinstall
> functionality is going to be counterproductive. Still, when I get the time
This is why I rewrote the autoinstaller from scratch as a zsh script. It is
easier to write, read, understand, hack and fix on the fly from a system
running on a ramdisk.
> to work on this and the boot-floppies are in a state to be developed on
> (rather than fixed, which is what we have to do now) then the things I'd
> be working on are: getting the installer to interact with the user only as
> a last resort (i.e., check the network for config info first), a parser
This is already done. My installed asks less than ten questions to the user,
and all of them can be avoided by storing values in config files, even on
the network, or by specifying them as command-line or boot options.
> for the fallthrough "which config file do I use" file, a parser for said
> config files, and a wrapper for fdisk which knows which disks to touch,
> and how to lay them out.
--
Massimo Dal Zotto
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| Massimo Dal Zotto email: dz@cs.unitn.it |
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