Local full install of Springdale 8

[Yasha Karant]

I have switched from Scientific Linux (SL), an IBM RHEL Fermilab/CERN "clone" distro of RHEL, as is the Princeton effort, to Ubuntu LTS current given the present IBM RH EL/CentOS/... situation.  However, I still participate in the SL list, in which Springdale 8 has been discussed as an alternative with the non-production of SL 8.  I was advised on that list to ask the question on a Sprindale list; if this is the wrong list, please advise. Below is the text of the exchange as I may read it in Thunderbird.  An answer to my question would be appreciated; I shall repost the answer to the SL list.

On Thu, Feb 04, 2021 at 01:59:08PM -0800, Yasha Karant wrote: Thus, it appears only an install from the web is available, not the ability to create local images (e.g., on bootable optical media or bootable USB flash drive). For reasons of both throughput limitations as well as network interruptions, I prefer to do a "fresh" install from local media. Is there a mechanism short of duplicating an entire distro web site of producing such an image for Springdale 8 EL? Off-topic here. Please take it to the Springdale support forum.

-- Konstantin Olchanski Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow! Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada

My post above to SL was in response to a SL post to which there was no such advice or objection:

I have not tried RHEL yet, but I have some success converting from CentOS 8 to Springdale 8 on a VM. Here are some instruction I found on rocky linux forum dnf update -y rpm -e --nodeps centos-backgrounds centos-indexhtml centos-gpg-keys centos-linux-release centos-linux-repos centos-logos rpm -ivh \ http://springdale.princeton.edu/data/springdale/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-appstream-8-0.sdl8.2.noarch.rpm \ http://springdale.princeton.edu/data/springdale/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-core-8-0.sdl8.2.noarch.rpm \ http://springdale.princeton.edu/data/springdale/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-release-8.3-0.42.el8.x86_64.rpm dnf distro-sync -y the distro-sync will reinstall every package Ching Him

[Tony Brian Albers]

Hi,

It's not entirely correct that you can only install over the network,
iso-images are only built on a per-need basis, so if nobody asks for
them they're not made. I can see how that could look like only
network-based installs are possible.

I'm sure that the very, very friendly people from IAS can cook up a DVD
image for you if you ask them (on this list) and they have the time for it.

HTH

/tony

--
Tony Albers - Systems Architect - IT Development Royal Danish Library,
Victor Albecks Vej 1, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
Tel: +45 2566 2383 - CVR/SE: 2898 8842 - EAN: 5798000792142

[Yasha Karant]

On the install web page of Springdale, the bootable DVD ISO install
images are shown as TBA, but available for the previous major releases.
Is the TBA going to be replaced by links to ISO images, or is this a
special request?

[inittux]

Converting Centos8 to Springdale Linux 8 works, I did this a month and a half ago or so, I figured that out how to myself and then just tested it on a vm and that worked. I then converted my personal vpses and my nas (also running a various other software) system, the most import thing running on my main vps is my mailserver. I only ran into two things with my nas: 1. Something with selinux(which was fixable) and 2. Efiboot broke(which I was able to fix afterwards and would have been able to prevent if I had thought of it ahead of time). My vpses were just normal BIOS boot and didn't have any problems with them, I did have run into two things with my test vm but I didn't run into those two problems with my vpses So I find it perfectly safe to convert a running system from CentoOS8 to Springdale Linux 8, but sure to have good backups just in case.

[Tony Brian Albers]

As I mentioned, IAS only builds ISO images if they are needed. So yes,
this is a special request.

But I'm sure that they'll help you out if they have the time for it.
They're in the US, so they probably won't reply until this afternoon CET.

Where are you located in the world? There might be a mirror that you
could use.

/tony

[Yasha Karant]

California, USA. I am confused by one thing:

https://puias.math.ias.edu/#Download

DVD
i386 x86_64
8.3 TBA TBA
7.3/7.9 ​Springdale Linux-7.3-i386-DVD.iso
5556e36b7c24f58138af5a4b1312a15717d67fb5a071f8d1912116e44aa7ebc9
​Springdale Linux-7.8-i386-netinst.iso
sha256sum:170c3b01323d095d6604a7fc1ee162302d087afac1dfa087d0689bd94eb85ad4
​Springdale Linux-7.5-x86_64-DVD.iso
sha256sum:f4324776f92ee6f4d8a8fc96ddcb7b346e96a51cbc6eac39b51ac8b485a602ad
​Springdale Linux-7.9-x86_64-netinst.iso
sha256sum:364740bf7df45127dcedac323c00a744067b98fc6f7bbf54196c9b9e3045fa65
6.6 / 6.8 ​Springdale-6.6-DVD-i386.iso
md5sum:38a95068129917d377aa52b29caaa547
​Springdale-6.6-DVD-2-i386.iso
md5sum:3f55cf46eb09577c231dde0adabc9cb3 ​Springdale-6.8-DVD1-x86_64.iso
md5sum:6346d2f55b9d8ef4aaa6cc08d4861216
​Springdale-6.8-DVD2-x86_64.iso
md5sum:839f5e8b689c9ed7f95ceaee96ba78f4

Thus, 8.3 is TBA . Is this because no one has requested the DVD ISO
bootable image files, but there were requests for 7.9 and earlier? Most
distros assume that such a DVD ISO (often in fact loaded onto a USB
flash drive if the ISO image is too large -- as it is for SL 8) will be
constructed. What am I failing to understand?

Thanks and -- Take care. Stay safe.

[Tony Brian Albers]

Ok,

At IAS they only do network installs. Where I work we only do network
installs and we have a mirror of Springdale that we use locally. So the
only ISO we've used(and only initially) is the netinstall-one from 8.1.

And yes, the 7.9 images are there because someone asked for them.

So it's not a matter of IAS being odd, it's just a matter of resources.

/tony

[Predrag Punosevac]

ISO images are hybrid. You can dd them into USB. Such USBs are bootable. Creating a DVD ISO is not a rocket science. Use boot.iso and network installation to install one machine and create your own DVD. You can search archive how to do this. Most people myself included use pxe boot and RedHat kickstart to install minimal servers and then finish them off with some kind orchestration tool (ansible in my case).

P^2

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[Theresa Arzadon-Labajo]

Hi Yasha,

We appreciate your interest in Springdale and relaying the question from SL mailing list. 

Similar to Predrag, at IAS, we pxe boot, use kickstart to install, then finish with puppet (maybe ansible at some point in the future).

Tony is correct. Providing the DVD iso is usually done by request now. It is mainly due to available resources/time. The few of us that work on Springdale are also working full time. The DVD iso creation process was much easier in 6. It became more difficult in 7 because we had to figure out ways to get the distro to fit. It takes time.  We haven't attempted to do 8 yet, but we will try to get something out as time permits.

Thanks,

Theresa

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[Yasha Karant]

Hi Theresa,

Four items:

1. SL did not attempt to force the bootable image onto a single DVD ISO
-- the ISO for SL 7 was larger than a single DVD (it would fit on a
Bluray) but instead was installed onto a bootable USB flash drive. From
experience, this works fine.

2. We had Puppet (or a similar system) installed for the same purpose
you mention -- but the developer after a new production release had to
halt that release and introduce an entirely new schema. At that point
-- requiring a new schema because the production release clearly had
major defects that only a new schema would address -- we abandoned that
particular vendor system given our concerns for future reliability and
that a large amount of our expended effort was wasted. This is just a
comment based upon our experience -- obviously, IAS has a different one.

3. A question to which I think I know the answer, but an explicit
answer would be useful. SL was (soon to be was as there has been no
announcement of what would have been SL 8, an effort that was announced
to be discontinued in favor of what turned out to be the IBM RH CentOS 8
situation) produced by paid professional staff at Fermilab/CERN. IAS is
a entity of Princeton, just as (in the "distant past") CSRG was an
entity of Berkeley. I assume that unlike "enthusiast" and "volunteer"
staffed distros, Springdale EL 8 is produced also by paid professional
staff of Princeton IAS, not a fully volunteer effort. (NB: As this
point has appeared on the SL lists -- "professional" to me does not
necessarily mean the standard academic degree for the field -- Oliver
Heaviside was in every sense a professional in his fields, but had no
originally earned university diplomata and no typical components of an
on-campus university education.)

4. SL, and the general EL community (including RHEL of the epoch) were
supported by EPEL and ElRepo to provide applications and systems support
beyond the base distro. For example, the proprietary Nvidia GPU drivers
and interface were ported and packaged as an installable executable RPM
set rather than downloading the Nvidia "build" package -- all
dependencies and system interface configurations were addressed by the
RPMs that were extensively tested before production release. Do these
repos work with Springdale EL, or does IAS replicate the efforts of EPEL
and ElRepo, or whatever will continue to fill their roles under whatever
IBM RH continues to release as nominally buildable source?

Thank you for the information.

Take care. Stay safe.

Thanks,

Yasha

> <http://springdale.princeton.edu/data/springdale/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-appstream-8-0.sdl8.2.noarch.rpm>
>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> \
> >>>>>
> http://springdale.princeton.edu/data/springdale/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-core-8-0.sdl8.2.noarch.rpm
> <http://springdale.princeton.edu/data/springdale/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-core-8-0.sdl8.2.noarch.rpm>
>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> \
> >>>>>
> http://springdale.princeton.edu/data/springdale/8/x86_64/os/BaseOS/Packages/springdale-release-8.3-0.42.el8.x86_64.rpm

> <mailto:springdale-users%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>.

> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/springdale-users/76e8f035-f5a2-16d0-0aa8-fb25871cb0b4%40kb.dk

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[Akemi Yagi]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 9:23 AM Yasha Karant <yka...@gmail.com> wrote:

> 4. SL, and the general EL community (including RHEL of the epoch) were
> supported by EPEL and ElRepo to provide applications and systems support
> beyond the base distro. For example, the proprietary Nvidia GPU drivers
> and interface were ported and packaged as an installable executable RPM
> set rather than downloading the Nvidia "build" package -- all
> dependencies and system interface configurations were addressed by the
> RPMs that were extensively tested before production release. Do these
> repos work with Springdale EL, or does IAS replicate the efforts of EPEL
> and ElRepo, or whatever will continue to fill their roles under whatever
> IBM RH continues to release as nominally buildable source?

You may want to read this thread:

https://groups.google.com/g/springdale-users/c/YhJmDS0aE9A

I can only speak for ELRepo and my answer is in there.

Akemi / toracat

[Yasha Karant]

Assuming that I want to establish a local mirror for an install, how
much capacity is required? More than 1 Tbyte? If one then copies the
mirror to a USB portable hard drive, can that USB local drive be used as
the mirror repo from which to install the distro? Will IAS allow a
mirror such as this to be established?

[Prentice Bisbal]

Yasha,

This is something I've actually been working on as my time allows.
Unfortunately, there's been a lot going on at work recently, so I
haven't had much time to devote to this.

Prentice

--

[Prentice Bisbal]

Yasha,

> IAS is a entity of Princeton

That is not correct. IAS is NOT an entity of Princeton University. This
is a common misconception.  IAS is a completely independent, separate
organization from Princeton University. They were never one
organization. It just happens to be located close to Princeton
University (on purpose), and the two organization collaborate a lot, but
they are entirely independent organizations.

> Springdale EL 8 is produced also by paid professional staff of
> Princeton IAS, not a fully volunteer effort.

Yes and no. Springdale Linux is managed by staff at Princeton and IAS to
meet *their* needs, and this work is done by only a few people (3, maybe
4 people) in addition to their other work responsibilities. There is no
full-time staff working on Springdale.

Work supporting the community outside of PU and IAS is voluntary. Since
PU and IAS do not use full DVD ISOs, this requests is very much
voluntary best-effort work. I have been working on this myself, and the
documentation on how to do this is pretty poor/confusing/non-existent,
so I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel.

Springdale is a rebuild of RHEL from the source RPMs, so any repo that
works with RHEL will work with Springdale. Springdale does not try to
duplicate the efforts of EPEL or ELrepo.

Prentice

[Yasha Karant]

Prentice,

My apologies. I looked at the Wikipedia article -- to correct a
misconception I learned at university.

It was founded in 1930 by American educator Abraham Flexner, together
with philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld.
Although it is close to and collaborates with Princeton University,
Rutgers University, and other nearby institutions, it is independent and
does not charge tuition or fees.[2]

Flexner's guiding principle in founding the institute was the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake.[3] The faculty have no classes to teach.
There are no degree programs or experimental facilities at the
institute. Research is never contracted or directed. It is left to each
individual researcher to pursue their own goals.[4][5] Established
during the rise of Fascism in Europe, the institute played a key role in
the transfer of intellectual capital from Europe to America. It quickly
earned its reputation as the pinnacle of academic and scientific life—a
reputation it has retained.[6][7][8]

The institute consists of four schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics,
Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. The institute also has a program
in theoretical biology.

It is supported entirely by endowments, grants, and gifts. It is one of
eight American mathematics institutes funded by the National Science
Foundation.[9] It is the model for the other eight members of the
consortium Some Institutes for Advanced Study.[8]

End excerpt.

Thus, IAS is dependent upon a relatively small endowment (that easily
could be invested in non-sustainable areas but that provide good
financial returns) and, like the rest of us for research, external
funding. Unlike Fermilab/CERN, "no experimental facilities" thus making
it an institution for theorists in the hard sciences. Presumably, in
the Historical and Social Scientists, the historians are able to travel
to view original sources, and social scientists produce instruments for
data in addition to travel to communities that are observational subjects.

[Matthew Cahn]

Louis Bamberger was one of the founders of the Bamberger's chain of department stores, one of which was located in the Princeton Shopping Center.  As a kid I used to go to Bamberger's.  The Princeton Bamberger's closed in 1980, and the location is now McCaffrey's Food Market.

-- Matthew

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[Prentice Bisbal]

Yes, the Bamberger's sold their chain of department stores headquartered in Newark, NJ to Macy's *just* before the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression, and used some of the profits from that sale for found IAS.

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-- 
Prentice Bisbal
Lead Software Engineer
Research Computing
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
http://www.pppl.gov

[PedVal]

Well I prefer the DVD ISO to netinstall. I installed Centos/Oracle/Scientific from DVD