Re: [TCLUG:3963] new distribution

[Peter Lukas <peter@math.umn.edu>]

RedHat's unsafe and dangerous linuxconf package allows for remote
administration and machine configuration via text, console and the web.
It's extremely unsafe and very NT to think that it's a good ideal to allow
web access to machine vitals (unless it was on a private lan with no pipe
to the internet).  If you're hot for a remote installation distribution,
rpm is a pretty decent place to start.  You have the ability to install
and update packages via anon/nonanon ftp (still pretty insecure).  Last
summer I redid our remote reinstallation procedure to accomodate RedHat's
distribution.  Naturally, it had to be modified to suit our needs and meet
security requirements which resulted in a distribution that was very much
our own.  The benefits are that multiple machines can be installed, used,
reformatted and reinstalled without ever having to be present at the
machine (after the initial build, of course).  It uses ssh authentication
and port forwarding so that the remote machine is authenticated by the
server before sensitive information like passwords and home directories
are transferred over to it.  It works quite well and is pretty scalable.
By relying on rpm, package installation and maintainence is a breeze and
could be easily modified to accomodate i386, alpha and sparc
distributions.  I guess that in thinking of creating a new distribution,
you may want to think of it as something akin to reinventing the wheel.
Package updates, kernel updates, security and bugfixes all need to be
maintained.  It becomes a little easier with the help of a decent
packaging system like debian or redhat package managers, but at that
point, they've done most of the work for you already.  Any hard-core linux
shop will ultimately end up with their own site-specific distribution.  In
our case, package updates are eventually done by ourselves, rather than by
a vendor because we've got our own needs for the software that may differ
from the vendor's.

Peter Lukas

On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Christopher Palmer wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Serge M. Egelman wrote:
> 
> > What would you guys think of a distribution that is setup over the web?
> > You put in a bootdisk (preferably a bootable CDROM), and then launch
> > netscape on another machine on the lan and configure the install from
> > there.
> 
> More so than the Web part, the remote part catches my attention. If you
> could make it configure several machines at once, remotely, that would be
> something.
> 
> Be sure to base it off of an existing distribution -- we don't need any
> more from scratch distros...
> 
> 
> 
> ---------(( Christopher Reid Palmer : www.pconline.com/~reid/ ))---------
> 
>               the characters i am, made into a word complete
>                               -- Meshuggah
> 
> 
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