existing automated and remote Linux install systems
HOWTO - Install Debian Onto a Remote Linux System
This document attempts to describe the steps required to change the Operating System running on a remote system to Debian. While tested under a Redhat system and also a bit under an existing system (woo! I converted Debian to... DEBIAN!), it should be applicable under any linux variant, and most likely other Unix's as well.
Also, this procedure should be applicable to installing any system that allows you to ssh (or maybe telnet - although not recommended) into it. It would also have to respect the chroot environment while installing
http://trilldev.sourceforge.net/files/remotedeb.html
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) for Debian GNU/Linux
FAI is an automated installation tool to install Debian GNU/Linux on a Linux Cluster or a bunch of different hosts. It's similar but better than other tools like kickstart for Red Hat, yast and alice for
SuSE?, lui from IBM or Jumpstart for SUN Solaris.
You can take one or more virgin PCs, turn on the power and after a few minutes Linux is installed, configured and running on the whole cluster, without any interaction necessary. Thus it's a scalable method for installing and updating a Beowulf cluster or a network of workstations unattended with little effort involved. FAI uses the Debian distribution and a collection of shell- and Perl-scripts for the installation process. Changes to the configuration files of the operating system are made by cfengine, shell and Perl scripts.
FAI's target group are system administrators who have to install Debian onto one or even hundreds of computers. It's not only a tool for doing a Cluster installation but a general purpose installation tool. It can be used for installing a Beowulf cluster, a rendering farm, a web server farm, or a linux laboratory or a classroom. Even installing a HPC cluster or a GRID and fabric management can be realized by FAI. Large-scale linux networks with different hardware and different installation requirements are easy to establish using FAI and its class concept. Remote OS installations, Linux rollout and mass installation are other topics for FAI
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
automating RAID/LVM
Note: this looks as if it's being done by Anaconda for Debian, so we should probably just wait and see how that project turns out.
notes on an idea to hack a debian installer
idea in short
plan outlined:
The approach that seems most appealing to us now is to add an LVM-on-RAID
option to the standard Debian installer, which clearly already has
mechanisms for identifying available hard drives, running scripts on reboot,
and so on. We agreed to start like this:
- Find out whether something like this has already been done. I think Red Hat's installer has a RAID option; we'll look at how they do it.
- Have a look at the Debian installer source code, and get a rough idea of what would be involved in adding something to it.
- Talk to the Debian installer developers, and see what they think
information on debian installer
This is the only information I could find on the debian installer:
http://people.debian.org/~mbc/di.html
tasksel
tasksel is a package that provides selection of configuration to be choosen from (bundled packages).
From Debian
/usr/share/doc/tasksel/README :
The interface GUI is based on libslang. It has no other special library dependencies.
about libslang
tasksel process
On startup, the tasksel program will read /usr/share/tasksel/debian-tasks.desc for
information about what tasks are available and their descriptions and sections. Next,
it will read /var/lib/dpkg/available. Task: fields in that file can be used to state that
a package belongs to a task or tasks. Also, the package names are used
to identify task packages (matching "task-*").
The tasks will be presented in a simple list selection screen with
their short descriptions. Users can drill down into the tasks to
see detailed descriptions and some information about the packages in the
task.
On exit, tasksel executes the appropriate apt-get command to install the
selected packages. If the -t option is given, then tasksel prints out the
command line to use to stdout instead. All other messages are printed to
stderr.
on tasksel package and bundle description format
/usr/share/tasksel/debian-tasks.desc show how tasksel bundles are presented. here's an example
Task: unix-server
Section: server
Description: conventional unix server
This task selects packages that would typically be found on a conventional
multi-user unix system with remote users. Do be warned that this includes
a number of daemons.
Solution to how does tasksel know what packages belong to this bundle is very elegant. In the list of all available packages on Debian system
/var/lib/dpkg/available, each package that belongs to any of the tasksel bundles contains additional line at the end of its entry. For example:
Package: bsdgames
Priority: optional
Section: games
...
Includes these programs: adventure, arithmetic, atc, backgammon, battlestar,
bcd, boggle, caesar, canfield, countmail, cribbage, fish, gomoku, hangman,
hunt, mille, monop, morse, number, pig, phantasia, pom, ppt, primes, quiz,
random, rain, robots, sail, snake, tetris, trek, wargames, worm, worms,
wump, wtf
Task: unix-server, games
This shows that package bsdgames belongs to
unix-server and
games tasksel bundles.
some thoughts on tasksel
tasksel seems to be a good framework for providing
socialtools-server as an additional option. All the selected packages/bundles are installed with apt-get, which means that socialtools could be a meta-package containing other components packed in .deb format. Since we do not conform to debian policies, having socialtools-server in Debian one day is unimaginable. Possible option might be providing a socialtools-debian startup/install CD, which will contain one, or more, socialtools bunles in tasksel. That way, we can automate installation of exactly those packages that we believe are neccesary to socialtools server. Or we might stick to
cd_image option where, as soon as we have one of the HD's partitioned, image will be copied to it. In that scenario, we have to maintain that image separately, while with tasksel option packages get installed each time from Debian CD.
current debian-installer TODO, from cvs
current debian-installer TODO - it highlights main issues faced by Debian developers in current development of installer
Redhat installer: anaconda
The Redhat installer lets you create LVM volumes on top of RAID volumes
during initial install, see
http://pcunix.com/Linux/lvm.html Maybe that's
one reason why big companies like to use Redhat. Redhat's installer is called
anaconda.