Debian OS on the d710s.

[Vicraj Thomas]

Dennis Schwerdel (copied on this email) is doing a tutorial at the
upcoming GEC. He would like to use five of the d710s at Utah for this
tutorial as they meet his specifications.

Dennis needs these machines to run Debian. We know Debian is not one of
the standard images. Has somebody in the recent past been able to boot
these d701s with Debian? How hard would it be for Dennis to get Debian
on these machines?

Thanks!

< Vic

[Robert Ricci]

Is there a particular reason why it must be Debian and non a
debian-based distribution like, say, Ubuntu?

Adding support for an entirely new distribution is a fairly major
undertaking, as we add a lot of hooks into the startup system, depend on
the details of how they do things like DHCP, and have a number of kernel
patches that we usually have to port.

[Vicraj Thomas]

On 2/27/12 1:33 PM, Robert Ricci wrote:
> Is there a particular reason why it must be Debian and non a
> debian-based distribution like, say, Ubuntu?
>

I'll let Dennis answer this since he knows his software the best.

> Adding support for an entirely new distribution is a fairly major
> undertaking, as we add a lot of hooks into the startup system, depend on
> the details of how they do things like DHCP, and have a number of kernel
> patches that we usually have to port.
>

We are certainly not expecting you to do any of this. If for some
reason Dennis cannot use, say Ubuntu, there is another option for this
tutorial that we'll explore.

Thanks!

< Vic

[Robert Ricci]

On 27 Feb 2012, at 13:47, schw...@informatik.uni-kl.de wrote:
>> We are certainly not expecting you to do any of this. If for some
>> reason Dennis cannot use, say Ubuntu, there is another option for
>> this
>> tutorial that we'll explore.
>

> Maybe I got something wrong but I thought that protogeni would be able
> to
> boot anything x86-based. Are the modifications you mentioned optional
> to
> improve performance or are they actually needed for a standard system
> to
> boot at all?

Yes, we can boot anything, but there are a few caveats:

1) Bootstrapping an install purely from scratch takes a lot of manual
intervention, since you have to send us the ISO, we have to burn it and
put it in a CD drive, and if the installer is not set up to use the
serial console, we would have to do the install, something we don't have
the expertise or manpower to do.

2) Due to the multi-homed nature of our machines, it's necessary to DHCP
on all interfaces at boot, and this is surprisingly difficult to
accomplish with some DHCP clients and setups

3) We automatically set up accounts, mount home directories, set up
routes, etc., and none of this would happen without our boot-time
scripts

4) Finally, we do a lot of monitoring of machines to make sure they boot
okay, etc., and a lot of this is accomplished through client side
scripts, none of which would be available on a clean image.

[Aaron Rosen]

I was able to run my own linux distro this way. Boot the standard
linux install which has linux running on /dev/sda2. Then install
debian on /dev/sda4. Next, reinstall grub telling it to boot /dev/sda4
as the root. The boot loader is a little weird so I'd recommend just
installing grub on every partition to ensure you get the right one.
After that you should be able to reboot and be running what you put on
/dev/sda4.

Aaron

[Robert Ricci]

Nice! This sounds like a good way to handle it. I learn something from
our users every day. :)