Re: [SAGE] Looking for call management/helpdesk software

[Jim <jimd@starshine.org>]

On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 04:50:24PM -0800, Robert Au wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 04:21:50PM -0800, Josh Smith wrote:
>> JXH> Debian does a good job of dealing with this live-ugprade stuff, and
>> JXH> doesn't assume you are sitting at the machine. I am becoming a big
>> JXH> fan of Debian.

>> Does Debian have anything like Kickstart (or Jumpstart)? That's long been
>> the killer app for my choice of OS. Upgrading without downtime is good,
>> but automated rebuilding is more critical (especially in academia, where
>> downtime isn't nearly as expensive).
 
> Here's a few (rough) notes I had for automatic Linux installation.
> System Installation Suite, unlike most of the others, is image-based, not
> package-based.
 
> FAI (Debian, Solaris)
> http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
  
> Kickstart (RedHat)
  
> alice (SuSE)

 I hadn't heard of this one.
  
> System Installation Suite (successor to IBM's LUI; works with
>   most Linux distributions)
> http://sisuite.org/
  
> NAIS (Debian, SuSE, maybe others)
> http://nais.sourceforge.net/

 Nor this one.
 
> How to Install Red Hat Linux via PXE and Kickstart
> http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~alfw/PXE-Kickstart/
 
> OSCAR (Open Source Cluster Application Resources)
> http://oscar.sourceforge.net/
 
> Cluster Command and Control
> http://www.csm.ornl.gov/torc/C3/

 There's also System Imager, originally created and maintained by
 VA Linux systems (nee VA Research, now VA Software).  VA is still
 the maintainer of SourceForge.

 There was also the Progeny AutoInstaller --- but I'm not sure it's
 being maintained.  Progeny was an offshoot of Debian whose prinipals
 were long time members of the Debian community.  Many of the Progeny
 people are still Debian maintainers and most (all?) of the Progeny 
 work was folded back into the mainstream Debian.  Progeny is still
 doing some work --- mostly with HP I gather: http://www.progeny.com/ 

 I have successfully used a Tom's Root/Boot, sfdisk and a shell script
 (and a read-only NFS server) to create a custom installation system.
 It's not as nice as Kickstart --- but it served its purpose before
 KS got better ;)

--
Jim Dennis