User-interactivity in %pre

[Martin Høy]

Quoting Greg Morgan <drkludge at cox.net>:

> Martin Høy wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I'm adapting FC3 to a rather large install-session at the
> > Norwegian Meteorological Institute 
>  >>>>>
> (around 200 machines).
> <<<<<<
> > 
> 
> Do you have groups of computers that are the same?  For example we 
> purchased 100 this year from same vendor at same time and same 
> configuration; 50 next year and then 50 from another vendor.  As much
> as I like anaconda, you may be a candidate for new Stateless Linux 
> configuration system.

Hmm, that sounds like it could be a good idea if one has a lot of
equal computers. Unfortunately, ours are not that homogeneous.
And further: They are separated in groups that have different needs
(i.e. the R&D-users have other needs than the production-users).

The solution we use is kickstart + cfengine (cfengine.org). It's
a really wonderful tool for keeping all the machines in sync:
I can create groups based on e.g. IP-ranges, and have different
policies applied.

Cfengine has many "actions" (e.g.: copy, editfiles, addmounts, 
shellcommands) that will run on each machine (triggered by cron) 
and either copy files from the global repository, or change local
files on the client. It takes some time to get used to, but once
you get it going, it really kicks ass :)


Regards,

Martin
-- 
"Computer science is not about computers any more than astronomy
is about telescopes." -- EW Dijkstra