From: Iain Barker (ibarker@aastra.com)
Date: Wed Feb 11 2004 - 10:06:04 EST
No solution, but some good suggestions received for workarounds.
Thanks to those who replied, as below.
The intentions of Tru64 v5.1B-1 just seemed to be confusing me. I expected it was going to be a technical refresh, with new OS CDROM pre-patched and ready to run on the latest HP hardware, but apparently it is just a marketing bundle of the existing 5.1B OS with an updated 5.1B-1 layered product CD, and the NHD7 and PK3 thrown into the same box.
The main problem that I encountered (and Stephen LaBelle also, in a separate posting) is that the instructions provided with 5.1B-1 box set are terrible; there is no clear starting point or indication of the correct sequence for a new operating system install at all.
Thanks to Gregory Rudd for confirming that NHD7 is the correct starting place. I'd already found buried on the NHD7 CDROM the PDF document explaining the NHD7 boot-link process and how it works with the OS CDROM. He also suggested was the idea of using a tape-based image for system cloning.
Thanks to Dr.Tom for suggesting the use of a RIS server-hosted install method to locate all of the software in one install archive, and some other off-list feedback I won't go into here.
I'll be potentially installing the new OS to over a hundred nodes at various sites and unfortunately we don't have RIS installed locally on site and these systems don't have tape drives fitted either.
But I realised that the drives on the DS15 are DVD not CDROM, so I should be able to just copy all the CD's onto a single DVD for distribution. At least that will avoid the worst part of the process (all the disk swapping). The 'automated install' will still be very manual for entering the software paths though, but I think we can deal with that through user documentation.
I might also try and attempt to 'roll my own' version of the OS CDROM and see if I can manually update the 5.1B base OS packages and kernel kitting with their NHD7 replacements.
Of course, it would have been much better if HP had shown some forethough and done this job properly in the first place rather than expecting their customers to be OS experts...
thanks.
-----Original Message-----
From: tru64-unix-managers-owner@ornl.gov
[mailto:tru64-unix-managers-owner@ornl.gov]On Behalf Of Iain Barker
Sent: Monday, 09 February, 2004 10:52
To: tru64-unix-managers@ornl.gov
Subject: NHD7/PK3 and OS 5.1b combined installs
Managers,
Is there a method available to combine the Tru64 install of the NHD7/PK3 and OS 5.1b operating systems install CDROMs?
Previously we cloned new production DS20 servers using the OS 5.1b-1 and an install.cdf file for the required filesets, so that one CDROM can be used to install all the packages on a new system. PK3 was installed afterwards when loading our application software.
For new systems we are purchasing DS15 servers. These require that NHD7 be used to support the new hardware during the install, and that necessitates booting a boot-linked kernel rather than the default genvmunix kernel from CDROM.
Boot-linking takes more than a dozen CDROM swaps between NHD7 and OS 5.1b, and is a *very* slow and error prone process.
Is there any method available to integrate the OS and NHD7 onto one CDROM so that we can go back to using the install.cdf automated cloning?
(For example, on our Win2k servers we can use the 'slipstream' method to integrate the service pack files into the base OS image and burn a new CDROM of the combined content)
I had hoped that this was the intention of OS 5.1b-1 refresh, but it seems that the OS CDROM on the OS 5.1b-1 package is the same as the original OS 5.1b disc, so still the excessive disk swapping is required to clone a new server.
Any help or insights appreciated.
thanks,
Iain
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