Nils Goroll
2008-Feb-07 18:25 UTC
Proposing new project (or community?) for diskless / OS-Service / netboot
Hi all,
I would like to push some diskless topics within the OpenSolaris
community and I would like to contribute a working framework + tools
which I am using in production.
I am posting this to a wider range of lists because somehow the
diskless topic does not fit into any of the exising communities - or
many of them.
The following communities relate to diskless, in one way or another,
IMHO:
HA Clusters
Installation and Packaging
NFS
OS/Net (ON)
Xen
ZFS
Zones
I feel that there really should be a Diskless community, but I dont
know if there is enough interest in the topic to justify a
community.
If diskless was to become a project, this would be my project request:
- A short (one or a few words) synopsis of the Project''s purpose,
and an optional shortened or decorative name (see 4.1).
Diskless / OS-Service
- A list of Community Groups sponsoring the Project.
Who would?
- A list of Participants constituting the initial Project Team,
including a single individual who will serve as the preferred
point of contact for matters regarding the Project.
me (nigoroll)
- A one-paragraph description of the Project, for an audience of
Participants who may not be familiar with the area in which work
is proposed. This should contain a brief description of the
problem(s) the Project is expected to solve, and of the manner in
which it will do so.
SHORT:
The project aims to revive the almost forgotten diskless client
technology which has the power to centralise patch and change
management and thus enables another path to efficient and cost
effective management of larger installations by improving the
tools and concepts for diskless client deployment and manage-
ment.
- A listing of related ongoing or proposed Projects, including
information about any dependencies on or by this Project and any
duplication of purpose or overlap with other ongoing work. This
listing should also include the name of the consolidation the
Project Team is targeting, if applicable.
xen - uses diskless technology to boot
newboot - changed the netboot process and might need to be amended by this
project
what else?
- Optionally, additional information which may be of interest to
prospective Project Team members and/or consumers of the Project''s
output.
Solaris can run off the network without the need for any local
disks. The basic concept of "diskless clients" dates back to the
1990s when Sun built workstations without any disks (SPARCstation
ELC).
Nowadays, the main use for diskless boot technology is to jumpstart
systems from an install server, but it is also being used productively
in real life data centres.
Diskless clients use NFS to access a split Solaris installation: A
dedicated (per diskless client) root filesystem (read-write) and a
shared /usr filesystem (read-only). Besides the advantage that this
concept ensures that many servers use the *same* operating environment
(not just copies of it), diskless client technology centralises patch
and change management and thus allows for efficient and cost effective
management of larger installations - at the expense of more complexity
on the central server (OS-Server).
Unfortunately, the tools to maintain a diskless client environment
built into (Open)Solaris today, are outdated, erroneous, inefficient - in
short, unsuable. The project aims to improve this situation.
To kick off the project, I (nigoroll) can contribute:
- An overhauled OS-Server structure concept which is being used in
production and allows to run various releases / patch levels off a
single OS-Server (can be on an HA cluster).
- The necessary information on how to serve highly available
OS-Services on Sun Cluster
- A "proof of concept"-stage code base in Perl, which re-implements
diskless client patching and does away with many drawbacks of the
dcpatch ksh script.
- Suggestions, concepts and implementations on how to make the PXE
boot process more secure.
What I (nigoroll) CAN NOT provide is any guarantee as to how much time
I will be able to invest into this project. I will try my best, though.
see a Sun SPARCstation ELC http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/sparc_elc/
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