checking hardware type automatically

[Roland Thomas Lichti]

Hi all!

On Wed, 08 Aug 2001, Matthew Palmer wrote:

> > > That's why you don't use 2.2 kernels.  2.4 is much nicer.
> > And buggier. So far 2.4 is not going to be the default kernel for debian
> > 3.0.
> Yergh.

Well, using FAI i had the "nice" situation of installing a server with
2.4 and reiserfs. After rebooting the reiserfs paniced all the time in a
routine only to be called with "enhanced checking" - but I don't use
this kernel option. We decided now to stay with 2.2 and ext2 for the
next couple of months  ...

> No, but they often are - the only device without a revision on the mobo on
> this box is the 10Mb ethernet card (RTL8029 if you're interested).  Also,
> they might be the same class and manufacturer, but a different model, as
> distinguished by the number after the colon in the device ID (the yyyy in
> Class zzzz: xxxx:yyyy)

> > But you are right. Using the company id's from the MAC and a more detailed
> > lspci -n probably gives Roland more possibilities to distinguish his
> > hardware "out-of-the-box".

Well, since all of our NICs are INTEL cards :-)))). I know do a
heuristic check over different combinations of pci cards. "If it is a
ServerWorks PCI bridge and it has an ADAPTEC or AMI RAID, then it has to
be a ... but if it has a GDTH raid, it has to be a ... - otherwise if it
has an INTEL pci bridge it has to be a ..." - not very nice, but it does
the trick.

next stage is a configuration server:

on the server I configure:

- Server type "web" with 2 cpus, 1 gig memory, at least 20 gig
  harddisk and from manufacturer "XYZ".
  hostname, networking data, and so on

- Server type "db" with 2 cpus, 4 gig memory, 70 gig harddisk and
  manufacturer "AAAA"
  hostname, networking data, and so on

And now the classes send a http request to the configuration server
stating their configuration. The server checks against the database,
marks the configuration as used (using the MAC ;-) and sends back an
configuration file with the whole configuration data which is now
configured on the system.

So when one of our project managers come with nine servers that "have to
be installed by tomorrow" - no problem, just a few keystrokes on the
configuration server, switching on all the systems and on they go ...


(and without any action they got inserted into our IRM-based
hardwaretracking system :-)

Anyone interested? If so I ask my employer if I'm allowed to do this
GPL'ed :-).

bye,
	Roland