9 Jan
2004
9 Jan
'04
5:42 p.m.
Thanks for your response and help...
On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Alain Knaff wrote:
It's all on the website.
There is lots of information, but I would not consider it
a howto at this stage. A howto should list the steps to
take in order, and with all of the details filled in, with
practical examples of the commands and configs. For example,
much of the gentoo documentation meets this definition.
Someone that barely understood what was going on should have
success with such a howto. For someone like me it fills
in the gaps for the 12% of what is going on that I don't get
from reading the documentation on all of the granular parts.
In other words, a series of man pages on each of the components
does not paint a complete picture of how to use them together
to acheive a goal, which is the view from 10,000 feet I'm looking for.
Perhaps when I'm done I'll try to contribute something
along these lines, to get it moving at least.
For instance, to get one machines image to a file, do
the following:
[A] On the machine itself: boot up the udpcast floppy or CD, just like
you would for a normal transfer. Chose sender
[B] On the machine were you want to store the image file: launch
"udp-receiver -f image-file"
More examples in the documentation would probably help.
When you say -f takes a file, it is difficult to know whether that
means /dev/hda or something like /usr/templates/IBM_master_template.gz
since everything in Unix is a file.
In the case of udp-receiver on the server, I'd think it should be
something like /usr/templates/IBM_master_template.gz
Now the reverse trip, to make the clones...
The server would run something like:
udp-sender -f /usr/templates/IBM_master_template.gz --min-clients 20
(assuming i want it to start after all 20 machines have connected)
while the target machines would boot a floppy or off the PXE to
launch the receiver built into it.
Do I have this right?
It is partly difficult to understand because of the
floppy menu not forming a visible part of the udpcast
source package and man pages. Coming from the g4u I am
expecting a shell script and executables on the floppy,
but I have yet to run it.
Regards,
--Donald Teed