8.8. Brief introduction to JumpStart administration
Diskless NFS was conceived in the
mid-1980s
during a time when disks for desktops were bulky, small in capacity,
and expensive. Much has changed since then. Because so much disk
space comes with desktop systems today, you may want to utilize it,
despite most of the advantages of diskless operation. One advantage
of diskless -- ease of administration -- is still quite
critical. If you decide that aside from ease of administration,
you'd prefer to have your clients be disk-full or even
dataless, you can still leverage the inherent diskless support in
your desktops to centralize many administration tasks, including:
-
Upgrading and patching the desktop operating systems
-
Modifying configuration files
Consider that you can install the operating system on your
desktop's local disk by booting from the network interface
instead of a disk, i.e., a
netinstall. On a
SPARC system, at the boot prompt you would do:
ok boot net - install
Solaris NFS servers have a feature known as
JumpStart installation that lets you customize
the configuration of your desktops.
The
difference between JumpStart-driven configuration and diskless driver
configuration is that with the former, the onus is on the user to
shut down and boot the desktop over the network to let JumpStart
configuration take effect. With diskless configuration, the system
administrator can make changes on the server and have the changes
take immediate effect. However, as discussed earlier in this chapter,
often such changes on the NFS server have to be coordinated with the
desktop user. Thus, you can argue that in terms of ease of
administration, there's no qualitative difference between
JumpStart and diskless operation.
It is beyond the scope of this book to describe the JumpStart feature
in detail. The Solaris documentation and the book Automating Solaris
Installations, by Paul Anthony Kasper and Alan L. McClellan (Prentice
Hall PTR/Sun Microsystems Press, 1995), are extensive treatments of
the subject. Once you've grasped the theory of JumpStart
installation, of particular interest will be the section
"Bypassing the Installation Software" in Chapter 10 of
Kasper's and McClellan's book. This section describes how
you can use "begin" and "finish" scripts to
modify the state of a system, without being forced to reinstall the
operating system. Thus configuration tasks can be done quickly and
efficiently, with no
unnecessary user interaction.
 |  |  |
| 8.7. Configuration options |  | 8.9. Client/server ratios |
