On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 01:11:43PM +0100, Bernhard Rohrer wrote:
> why not use remote boot - RIPL via bootp/PXE? not for distribution but for
> diskless operation?
Well we do use PXE for our installation system. But I'd not touch it for
diskless operation.
For big projects, we have looked at setting up a master boot server
which can image and re-task servers on demand - think of a big mail
cluster with say 20 machines. We might want say 1 more MX and one less
DB server for a particular period, and using the setup we could just
have it happen with a system reboot. But even then, our plan and testing
are centred around reinstalling to disk on demand.
Running diskless and booting on demand introduces a pretty big and
dangerous dependency, we'd have to put a *lot* of work into making the
boot service (which includes the servers, switches, and routers) ultra
resilient, and I don't see much pay-off.
We use software RAID-1 almost everywhere (avoiding a raid card as a SPOF)
for our system disks. And it's not like disks are expensive.
--
Colm MacCárthaigh Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net
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