cluster

[Jens Rühmkorf]

Hi Shashi, hi Thomas, hi everybody else!

On Fri, 7 Jul 2000, Thomas Lange wrote:

> Hi Shashi,
> 
> if you only want to upgrade and do not make a complete new
> installation, you can use apt-get dist-upgrade. In fai there's
> following trick to answer all questions:
> 
> DEBIAN_FRONTEND=Noninteractive
> export DEBIAN_FRONTEND
> 
> then
> 
> apt-get -f -y dist-upgrade </dev/null
> 
> or 
> 
> yes 'n' | apt-get -f -y dist-upgrade
> 
> [...]

I'm not quite sure whether this is sufficient to upgrade a cluster from 2.1
to 2.2. We had the same "problems" with our cluster; we simply installed a
small subset with 2.2 and checked if erverything went alright (that's also
what Thomas suggested in the end of his mail). You could dist-upgrade one
client "interactively" to start with. 

What I would suggest iff -- for whatever reasons -- *upgrading* the 
cluster is the preferred option:

1. Boot your client from a boot disk or your NIC and copy a sh-script called
"setup.sh" to /root/setup.sh. ATTENTION: From 2.1 to 2.2 the location where
/etc/init.d/rcS will look for "setup.sh" has changed from /root/setup.sh (in
2.1) to /sbin/setup.sh (in 2.2). So don't get confused here ;) This could be
achieved by adding another action in FAI like "upgrade" (the case-loop in
"rcS") that just copies the file "setup.sh", then does a reboot. I would
strongly discommend using FAI in a chroot environment to upgrade your
clients, because there are even more "errors" to occur that are inexpectable
(this is the other option instead of using "setup.sh"). 

2. Create a sh-script "setup.sh" that has everything you need. Basically 
that is 

-- snip --
#! /bin/bash
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=Noninteractive
yes '' | apt-get -f -y dist-upgrade
-- snap --

But be aware that a "dist-upgrade" usually asks you a lot of questions,
whether you want to keep your "/etc/config" or use the one that comes with
the package, it informs you that something has changed and so on. I don't
know whether the default is always alright :(

Of course what I described above can be achieved using NAIS as well, send us
an email to nais at informatik.uni-koeln.de if you want us to add such an
"update-option" and you will have it by tomorrow. But still I think that
neither FAI nor NAIS is really "feasible" for this (we never tested anything
like this). Also keep in mind that with Mattias' tool "setup_harddisks" you
can preserve some partitions, which might help doing it the proposed way ;)

So my question: If some of you on this list have already had success with
using FAI to update from 2.1 to 2.2, what did it look like? 

Good luck trying things out!

Jens

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