On Sep 18, Feico Dillema wrote
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like comments from people that have worked on the sysinst
> tool on the following:
> 
> Would it be easy (to implement) and nice (to have) to add the folowing feature 
> to the sysinst tool: Let sysinst record a trace/log of the 
> installation/configuration parameters it gets from the user to get a NetBSD 
> system up and running. For a subsequent install that trace/log could then be 
> used to do an automatic install on that particular machine.
> 
> I assume some of you would shudder at the thought, but I think it
> could be a quite useful feature for client systems that store
> all personal data on file-servers and only have NetBSD/X11 and
> maybe /usr/pkg on the local disk, i.e. have only local stuff
> that can be reconstructed automatically. Such systems used by 
> `ordinary users' would then be easier maintain, as system-admin
> intervention/time is not necessary to reconstruct a system
> after a hard crash (hardware failure or user powering down
> system without proper halt-ing the machine etc). `Just' give
> the user a boot-floppy with sysinst and its log/trace from last 
> time...

I'd prefer another way of doing it: use dhcp.
This way, a sysadmin could set up a dhcp server for his machines
(IP addr, DNS, gateway but also partitions sizes, list of packages to install,
etc ...) and a user would just put a floppy in and come back later.
Maybe this require a different, non-sysinst floppy (or with a different
sysinst).

I may set up something like this for my student rooms (30+ machines,
almost identical). It we can get a good design of this, I may be able
to do something quite generic.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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