Christian Kurmann, Felix Rauch, Thomas M. Stricker
Laboratory for Computersystems
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Revised 24 November 1999, Christian Kurmann
We use a minimalistic boot-floppy / boot-Zip-disk combination based on the Linux distribution muLinux to boot a new or broken machine. With such a boot disk the empty machine can be booted and brought to the network.
The next steps are just to mount the /images directory from the imageserver over the network and to start the initinstall script which installes the initial image and configuration file. With this the machine can be booted in the Service-Linux system an the remaining operating systems can be installed with the restore or rclone scripts.
Boot the machine with the muLinux boot floppy or zipdisk and login as root. Then mount the /images directory from the server
mount /imagesor depending on your /etc/fstab
mount -t nfs imageserver:/images /images(where imageserver is the machine which stores the partition images)
Start the installation script:
/images/scripts/initinstall hostname yourname
This will install the sda_InitClone.gz image to the device sda on the local machine an generate an initial configuration file for the machine in the config-directory (by copying the initconfig file).
After that the machine has to be rebooted into the now newly installed CloneSys (Linux) where the rest of the partitions can be installed with rclone or restore.
Caution! Don't boot uninstalled systems as they could be automatically removed from the boot-menu.
Restoring the partitions means that the same images that are specified in the initconfig shall be initialized. To restore one or more partitions on a cluster the restore script can be used as follows:
restore yourname -d sda5 sda6 sda7 sda8 sda9 sda10 -h hostname
This restores the images for all the partitions sda5 to sda10 on the machine with the given hostname. This command can be executed local or on a server.
It calls the rclone command for all the specified devices and machines with the default image which is the image specified in the config files.
If different images shall be installed the rclone script can be used as follows:
rclone sda5 WinNTEducNew yourname hostname
which would install the image WinNTEducNew on sda5.
For saving installations and releases as well as to clone images to the cluster, backups to the image server have to be made. Therefore the backup and rbackup scripts are provided. They perform a backup of the raw device and gzip the data.
The file names are constructed as follows: device_imagename.gz, e.g. sda1_SysCom.gz.
A comment has to be provided for each image that is generated. This will be stored in the image description log which can be displayed with the imagedesc command.
backup sda5 WinNTEduc yourname "WindowsNT 4.0 SP4" rbackup sda5 WinNTEduc clientname yourname "WindowsNT 4.0 SP4"
This backs up the device sda5 to the imageserver. The image name will be sda5_WinNTEduc.gz and the comment in the image description database ``WindowsNT 4.0 SP4''. Note that the double quotes (``'') are important! The rbackup script can be used to back up a remote machine. The only difference to backup is the parameter clientname which has to be provided.
To install the saved partitions on to cluster machines the clone and rclone scripts are provided which read the image over the network, gunzip them and write the data to the specified partition. The script essentially uses the following command:
gunzip -c /ipath/iname |dd of=/dev/device bs=1024
rclone sda5 WinNTEduc yourname client1 rclone sda5 default yourname 3 4 5
The first command will clone the image sda5_WinNTEduc.gz to the device sda5 on host client1. After a successful clone it changes the entry in the config file to the appropriate values.
The second command runs the clone script on the machines with the alias rifpc3, rifpc4 and rifpc5, which restores the last installed image defined in the config file of the machine.
Restoring partitions on a cluster means that the same image that was installed on the machines shall be reinitialized. To restore one or more partitions on a cluster the restore script can be used. It calls the rclone command for all the specified devices and machines with the default image which restores the last installed image specified in the config files.
restore yourname -d sda6 sda7 -h 10 12 14
This restores the images for the partitions sda6 and sda7 on the machines with the aliases rifpc10, rifpc12 and rifpc14.
Patagonia CloneSys --
A Tool to Install Multi-Boot Environments
Quick-Reference
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 96.1-h (September 30, 1996) Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 0 -t CloneSys Quick-Reference -auto_navigation -dir /home/kurmann/wcops/patagonia/quickinit quickinit.tex.
The translation was initiated by Christian Kurmann on Wed Dec 22 11:00:11 CET 1999