Initialising a fresh PC or fresh disk for ALLiE
- If a new PC is to be brought into the ALLiE controlled cluster,
or the internal disk of an existing PC has broken and needs to be
initialised, then the first consideration is whether to install the PC
disk's first system using a distribution's installation
CDROM/USBdisk and the existing kickstart, or to rsync as an image from
the cluster's rsync server,
running the rsync from a gparted or other live non-resident Linux
system.
- If installing from the distribution's installation CDROM/USBdisk
(recommended),
then
- boot from that device, if necessary using a boot menu to choose
the right boot device;
- press Tab to enter installation kernel option
ks=http://server/path/to/kickstart
; don't add any option which might be scripted into
the kickstart for use only with a model install (vanilla).
- Let the installation proceed to completion.
- The system is then ready to boot and will automatically then
load other
systems by virtue of image overlay and /root/conf/ scripts.
- If installing using the rsync server's full image (not
recommended until a bit more automated):
- Boot from a CDROM/USBdisk created from an ISO of gparted, or
Fedora install, or other Live Linux system, and get to the stage where
you have obtained a root prompt
- Partition the drive in the same way as in the above-mentioned
kickstart %pre section
- Issue
mkfs -t ext3 -L sys
/dev/sdaN
substituting suitable values for sys
and N
- Issue
mount /dev/sdaN
/mnt
- Issue
rsync -a
rsyncserver::system-module
/mnt
- Perform operations that would normally be done in the
kickstart %post section, including:
- Run the /root/install-rsync.sh script to provide the image
overlay, which after reboot will take on the task of updating the
system and installing other systems;
- Run the command in the kickstart %post which creates the
masterboot partition, so you can boot.