[Infrastructures] Re: Host installs?

[stephen white]

On Friday, February 7, 2003, at 02:45 AM, Joel Huddleston wrote:
> The rule we took away from this experience was -- install the whole 
> kernel
> even if you are not planning on using the WizyWizbang Frimptical
> Confongulator in your infrastructure, if the OS vendor has the driver,
> drop it on the box.

 From my experience, I had no difficulty whatsoever with managing 
separate classes of machines derived from the same base installation.

The base installation would consist of the bare minimum of packages 
necessary to create a functional machine, along with common utilities 
like the GNU tools.

The server overlay would consist of installing NFS, NTP, HTTP and other 
server applications, all defaulting to disabled.

The client overlay would consist of X-Windows, compilers, and other 
user applications.

Then the individual configurations for each machine would enable and 
customise the required applications.

Since the only machine the users see, the heterogeneous environment was 
preserved from the user's point of view. The sysadmins also had a 
heterogeneous environment for the server machines.

Any OS and general updates went into the base installation. Server 
specific and user specific updates were similarly easy to locate.

Regarding your experience, the conclusion I would have drawn would have 
been to reach into that single different machine, rip out the different 
video card and replace it with something the same as the rest of them.

If you really really had to have that video card (as I did with the 
Powerstorm on the DPWS Alphas), this can either be an individual 
customisation or resident within a third group overlay.

I had this level of configurability because I ripped out the standard 
installation scripts and wrote my own, hence I could precisely control 
what and how anything got loaded in, rather than having to start 
configuring after the machine was installed.

The most important thing is to refrain from giving the users something 
they haven't asked for, or they'll use it and it'll become a management 
pain in the arse. This is why I don't install ksh, zsh and alternative 
versions of the same thing - there's always some obscure feature 
lurking in one of them that a user will become reliant on, and you'll 
have to support it in perpetuity.

--
   steve@cs.adelaide.edu.au