Woody roll-out

[chewie at wookimus.net]

Blake Barnett said:
> Do you know of any successful implementations?  (say.. 15-50
> servers..)  Anyone I could use as a reference?  I don't want to

Yes. Ours. ;-)  I'm working for the Institute for Mathematics and its
Applications (IMA) at the University of Minnesota.  I've used our
woody-based FAI to install a number of minimalistic servers as well as
full-blown workstations.  There are lots of network topology, NFS, NIS
and software cleanup to do, so documentation and publication of our
setup hasn't really been at the forefront of my TODO list.  The good
news is that I've got most of the desired packages to install cleanly,
and the third-party software packages -- mathmatica, matlab, maple, etc.
-- are successfully being run via NFS automounts.

I am attempting to write up texinfo documentation (I need to learn emacs
again to take advantage of the texinfo mode) for our sysadmins on "how I
did it" and users for "what does it mean to me", so the website articles
won't be far behind (texi2html and into2www are great).  

I am CVS controlling our templates, and using a wonderful little Perl
tool called cvs2cl to keep track of the ChangeLog's.  One thing I want
to do is tie in an auto-update of the CVS working directory checked out
on our FAI server.  That way, whenever I tag a file as CURRENT_RUNTIME,
it'll launch the 'cvs update' on the FAI server. ;-)

I'd also love to take advantage of the use of cfengine on each machine.
I've come to really appreciate the tool in the configuration of the
boxes during installation, and I can only see my systems management
becoming easier with its use site-wide.

I haven't been able to convince my boss to run everything under Debian,
but he's got some good points for running the "other" Linux distro.  I
do amuse him with my evalgelism, though. ;-)

I may convince the Math department into using a similar setup.

Thomas Lange said:
> I'm always looking for references, but no one makes a little web page
> or write a short "how I did it". I would like to collect links to
> installations using FAI, but there are few people giving me a link.
> Some other installations (but too few):
> 	http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/other.html
> 
> Look also at: http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/search4inst.html

I'll look into putting up a cursory website, soon.  

--
Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net>