Rsyphon

Born from SystemImager

Quick Start

• Do a make get_source.
• Modify the source code as desired.
• Modify the init script as desired: vi skel/etc/init.d/rcS
• Modify any other configuration files as desired. Most of these are in the "skel" directory. (skel is short for skeleton files)
• Run "make install"

For more detailed information, please read the rsyphon manual, which is available in the rsyphon-doc package and in this wiki.

Get some machines together. You will need one machine to act as your image server, one machine to act as your golden client, and one machine to act as an autoinstall client. The image server needs to have enough disk space to hold the entire contents of the golden client's filesystems, and the golden client and autoinstall client should be as identical as possible.

On your golden client, apt-get install rsyphon-client.

On your image server, apt-get install rsyphon-server

On your golden client, run the command "rs_prepareclient". rs_prepareclient will ask you some questions, then leave your golden client ready to have it's image pulled.

On the image server, run the command:

rs_getimage -golden-client <golden_client> -image <image_name>

where <golden_client> is the ip or hostname of your golden client, and <image_name> is the name you would like to use to refer to this image, e.g. web_server, woody_2001_10_05, debian2.2r4_lp1000r, etc. You should see filenames fly by on the screen as getimage rsyncs over the contents of your golden client.

Assign clients to an image

On the image server, run the 'rs_addclients' command to assign clients to your image.

Create autoinstall media

Configure your dhcp server using the 'rs_mkdhcpserver' command.

You can also create autoinstall media for booting your autoinstall client(s). There are currently 4 supported types of media (cd, pxe, usb drive & hard drive/usb key).

Autoinstall

Boot your autoinstall client from the autoinstall media - your client should begin to autoinstall itself.

Notes on customizing and building your initrd.gz

• Files in the ./skel/ directory are copied directly to the ramdisk you can edit the files there, or drop in your own.

• Source tarballs for a few binaries are needed during the build. An attempt is made to download them w/ wget, but you can download them separately and drop them into the tree by hand. See the Makefile for locations. If the download attempt fails because these files no longer exist, please report this as a bug. wget will pay attention to your http_proxy and ftp_proxy environmental variables.

• Development is done on Debian systems, therefore this is the suggested platform for building.

• Dynamic libraries can hog up a lot of the space in your ramdisk. The "mklibs.sh" script from Debian's boot-floppies package is used to reduce the overall size, but it is dependent on the existence of the associated pic archives. On Debian systems, you can 'apt-get install libc6-pic' to insure that these libraries are on your system. If you ran 'apt-get boot-floppies' to install that package, then the pic libraries should have been installed along side the boot floppies package. In the case of libc6, newer versions usually mean larger libraries. We currently use libc6-2.1.3. As a comparison:

  Debian Version libc6 version resultant initrd.gz size

  2.2 (potato) 2.1.3 610761 bytes unstable (sid) 2.2.3 682281 bytes

• The kernel on your development machine must support loopback devices.

• /dev entries are created from the contents of the dev_ls-lR file. To customize, either edit this file, or:

  1. Modify the entries in /dev of an existing ramdisk to suit your needs
  2. Create a new dev_ls-lR file by cd'ing to the customized /dev directory and capturing the output of 'ls -lR'

• You may also need to customize the size of your ramdisk, and the number of inodes available on your ramdisk. These are options in the Makefile.

• Be sure that the binaries that will be installed from your local system are actually on your local system. Make sure you have all of the "Build-Depends" packages from the ./debian/control file installed. You should also have all of the Debian build-essential packages installed (stuff like make and gcc).

Interesting Make Targets

install: installs a compressed ramdisk to your local system

initrd.gz: builds a compressed ramdisk

get_source: the build system checks in multiple locations for external source these locations are, in order of preference: - upstream tarballs in /usr/src/ - upstream uncompressed source in the top level (this is primarily here for the debian packaging). - a well-known url on the net the get_source target will cause all of the required third party source to be downloaded. once you have downloaded this source once, please copy it to one of the other locations to reduce unnecessary load on the respective servers, and speed up your build process.

clean: cleans the source tree, but leave around downloaded third party source

distclean: cleans the source tree, including removal of downloaded third party source

Upgrading

When upgrading, please follow the directions in the "Upgrading" chapter of the manual. The manual is available in the rsyphon-doc package. Not following these instructions will usually result in failed installations.

Makefile targets you are probably most interested in:

all Build everything you need for your machine's architecture.

install_client_all Install all files needed by a client.

install_server_all Install all files needed by a server.

install_initrd

pre_download_source Download source tarballs, but don't build anything. Useful to prep for offline builds.

source_tarball Make a source tarball for distribution.

Includes Rsyphon source only.  Source for all
the tools Rsyphon depends on will be found in /usr/src 
or will be automatically downloaded at build time.

complete_source_tarball Make a source tarball for distribution.

Includes all necessary source for building Rsyphon and
all of it's supporting tools.

rpm Build all of the RPMs that can be build on your platform.

srpm Build yourself a source RPM.

deb Build all of the debs that can be build on your platform.

show_build_deps Shows the list of packages necessary for building on various distributions and releases.

show_all_targets Show all available targets.

---

Diagram

                               Image Server

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | rs_cpimage +-------------------+ | | | | | | +--------------> image B | | | | +---^---------------+ | | +----------+----------+ | +---------------------+ | | | | | | | | | | image A | | | + image C | | | +---------------------+ | +---------------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +----------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+ ^ | | rs_getimage | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | rs_pushupdate | rs_pullupdate +-------+----+---------------------------+ | | | | | | | v | | | | | +----------------------------------------+

                                Golden Client