Re: Thoughts about changing Debian's release process
On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 09:36:36AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 10:30:26AM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> > FAI can be a total disaster recovery solution when you couple it with your
> > backups, however I will freely admit that it takes a lot of time (and
> > testing) to get it such that you can punch out an identical box,
> > sausage-machine style. Then of course you need to keep it up to date as
> > well.
>
> I think that last phrase is the major problem...
>
> I can see how FAI is great if you need to punch out a huge load of
> identical machines; but to update the scripts after installation such
> that they would produce identical machines to the ones already running,
> would a) require a testing environment which we do not have (or cannot
> provide), and b) would take a lot of time that, I think, the admins do
> not have.
I'm doing this since 2-3 years now with a massively patched version of FAI,
which supports 'softupdates': everything except partitioning is changable at
runtime within the normal FAI infrastructure.
Change your FAI configuration, send an update-request to the client, and
afterwards it will look similar as a newly installed machine. The update
takes place on-line, so _if_ there are no major errors in your
FAI-configuration, there even won't be any noticable downtime.
I even migrated some machines from woody to sarge using softupdate and only
ran into problems if the dependencies in the debian archive are broken, such
as in the current perl packages: #279232...
--
c u
henning
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