The Ubuntu drop is native; the machines dual boot after it's all over.
The (very) rough details of how to do it are:
1. Grub for Windows and an initrd image are pushed to the Windows Box.
2. The Windows box is rebooted into Linux, and mounts an nfs share, which contains enough stuff to get most of the install working. The hard drive has its NTFS partition resized, leaving space for the Linux drop.
3. The Linux partitions are created in the newly created free space, and then Linux is set up, with the majority of the packages sourced from an Ubuntu mirror (we proxy through Squid, though as we had some snags using apt-proxy) with a custom pre-seed file.
That's the basics. One of the reasons we need to be able to be able to easily control which o/s to boot into is because most of the PCs run Windows during the day (they are almost all Lab resource workstations at the Uni where I work), and there's a desire to run a Beowulf like setup, out of hours, and during holidays.
We did try FAI, but because of the Windows infrastructure, we can't run a DHCP/TFTP setup, and booting from a floppy on each workstation was too hideous a concept. Also, FAI is a cryptic as a cryptic thing on a particularly cryptic day, and is horrendous (IMHO) to set up.
So far, none of it is documented (at all!) but we will be publishing a "how we did it" once the dapper drop is deployed. Right now, I'm not sure where, but it'll prolly go through the Ubuntu website, somewhere or another.
There have been two of us *involved* in getting it all sorted, but to be honest, I can only bathe in the reflected glory of my colleague at work, because it is he who has been the driving force behind this, and it is he who has carried out the vast majority of the (brain) work. I have been peripheral in this process.
And we'll be deploying it, automatically, to around 400 workstations, which will be switched on, and running Win XP, all without any manual intervention. And they'll dual boot (Windows/Linux!) afterwards. Which is nice. Eat your heart out FAI.:)
Oh, and it works nicely under VPC, apart from needing to rebuild the kernel so that the timer tick runs at 100Hz, instead of 1000Hz. Which is also nice.
Slashdot Mirror
This generally gets deployed to (reasonably) freshly RISd Windows boxes, so free space is mostly not a problem.
As the peripheral component in all this, I think we should wait until July :P
Hi,
The Ubuntu drop is native; the machines dual boot after it's all over.
The (very) rough details of how to do it are:
1. Grub for Windows and an initrd image are pushed to the Windows Box.
2. The Windows box is rebooted into Linux, and mounts an nfs share, which contains enough stuff to get most of the install working. The hard drive has its NTFS partition resized, leaving space for the Linux drop.
3. The Linux partitions are created in the newly created free space, and then Linux is set up, with the majority of the packages sourced from an Ubuntu mirror (we proxy through Squid, though as we had some snags using apt-proxy) with a custom pre-seed file.
That's the basics. One of the reasons we need to be able to be able to easily control which o/s to boot into is because most of the PCs run Windows during the day (they are almost all Lab resource workstations at the Uni where I work), and there's a desire to run a Beowulf like setup, out of hours, and during holidays.
We did try FAI, but because of the Windows infrastructure, we can't run a DHCP/TFTP setup, and booting from a floppy on each workstation was too hideous a concept. Also, FAI is a cryptic as a cryptic thing on a particularly cryptic day, and is horrendous (IMHO) to set up.
So far, none of it is documented (at all!) but we will be publishing a "how we did it" once the dapper drop is deployed. Right now, I'm not sure where, but it'll prolly go through the Ubuntu website, somewhere or another.
There have been two of us *involved* in getting it all sorted, but to be honest, I can only bathe in the reflected glory of my colleague at work, because it is he who has been the driving force behind this, and it is he who has carried out the vast majority of the (brain) work. I have been peripheral in this process.
And we'll be deploying it, automatically, to around 400 workstations, which will be switched on, and running Win XP, all without any manual intervention. And they'll dual boot (Windows/Linux!) afterwards. Which is nice. Eat your heart out FAI. :)
Oh, and it works nicely under VPC, apart from needing to rebuild the kernel so that the timer tick runs at 100Hz, instead of 1000Hz. Which is also nice.
...sucks more than spam itself. Who cares? Popfile & Spamassassin are working just fine for me.