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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - 13th Systems Administration Conference - LISA '99
Enterprise Rollouts with Jumpstart
Jason Heiss, Collective Technologies
Abstract
JumpStart is Sun's solution for installing the Solaris operating
system. The Custom JumpStart feature allows the installation process
to be automated. However, configuring boot and NFS servers and the
appropriate name services for JumpStart is a time-consuming and
error-prone process. The scripts that Sun provides do not help this
process much. This paper will talk about how to better automate the
configuration steps needed to perform JumpStarts over the network,
emphasizing speed and accuracy as well as simplicity from an
operator's point of view. The infrastructure needed to perform large
numbers of simultaneous JumpStarts is also discussed. By automating
the actual rollout process, it is possible to JumpStart several
hundred machines at once. Techniques for doing so are presented. The
improvements presented in this paper allowed one company to improve
the speed of their rollouts to 600 Sun workstations by more than an
order of magnitude. This greatly decreased user downtime and saved the
company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lastly, possible future
improvements to the process are discussed.
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