Prepackaged configurations

[Rafael Garcia Leiva]

Dear All,

John Hearns wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-05-22 at 19:43, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Something that's missing in the OS is an "out of the box" experience
> > for the different ways one might use the operating system.
> >  
> > In an ideal world, someone could maintain the canonical best practice
> > setup for say a locked-down desktop lab, and everyone else just
> > clicks/types "install me a locked down desktop lab system," applies any
> > site-local tweaks, and that's it.
> > 
>
> Also look at the related Quattor project from CERN.
> http://quattor.web.cern.ch/quattor/
> This is being developed for the automatic installs of heterogenous
> machines on a Grid.

Quattor is a general tool for fabric management (installation, configuration 
and management), including both grid and non-grid environments.

> I don't see why the PAN language developed there couldn't be used for
> these canonical machine types.

Yes, you can use the Pan language to define your "canonical machine types". 
With Pan you can create a profile template describing the configuration of 
every type of canonical machine, and then fill in the gaps with the final 
specific user information (ip address, user accounts, and so on).

The true is that Pan and KickStart have been already integrated. We have an 
"Automated Installation Infrastructure", that uses 
DHCP/PXELinux/KickStart/Pan to automatically install a client machine using a 
set of "standard" profiles. But, if you need so, you can use only the 
KickStart/Pan part as well.

Cheers

-- 
Rafael Angel Garcia Leiva
Universidad Autonoma Madrid
http://www.uam.es/angel.leiva