by Howdy.
We have been using Jumpstart as the means for automating the loading of
our servers and workstations (SS20s and SS5s) for well over a year with
great success. However, there is one situation that has always been
nagging me, and maybe someone out there can shed a little light on the
answer, or point me to where I can find the answer.
We typically reload systems every several weeks since I work in a testbed
and do systems and software integration work. Thus, the disk partition
and configuration information rarely changes, the packages and patches on
the OS rarely change, the COTS software rarely changes and it's generally
the developer's application software that changes.
So, my questions are: If Jumpstart is used to completely reload a system
where the OS is not different from the previous load and the disk and
partitioning information has not changed, does Jumpstart perform an actual
repartitioning of the disks and a newfs and fsck, or does the utility
merely check to see if the existing information on the disks is the same
or different from that in the "profile" file?
I have had situations where I used our automated load procedure, and at
the comletion the system came up as the system I had previously loaded.
This has led me to believe that I cannot rely on Jumpstart to "clean" my
system and so now I recommend to the people on my project that they boot
single user off of a CDROM and "munge" the old filesystem by
repartitioning the drives to something different than that of the
Jumpstart installation and then newfs these new partitions.
This adds a lot more time to the installation process, but I haven't had
any more "ghost" systems creep up in the testbed anymore.
Any comments?
Regards,
Rich Johns