Subsections


2.9 An overview of SIS

The System Installation Suite, or SIS, is a tool for installing Linux systems over a network. It is used in OSCAR to install the client nodes. SIS also provides the database from which OSCAR obtains its cluster configuration information.

The main concept to understand about SIS is that it is an image based install tool. An image is basically a copy of all the files that get installed on a client. This image is stored on the server and can be accessed for customizations or updates. You can even chroot into the image and perform builds.

Once this image is built, clients are defined and associated with the image. When one of these clients boots using a SIS auto-install environment, either on floppy, CD, or through a network boot, the corresponding image is pulled over the network using rsync. Once the image is installed, it is customized with the hardware and networking information for that specific client and it is then rebooted. When booting the client will come up off the local disk and be ready to join the OSCAR cluster.

2.9.1 Building a SIS image

Normally, an OSCAR image is built using the <Build OSCAR Client Image> button on the OSCAR wizard. This button brings up a panel that is actually directly from the SIS GUI tksis. Once the information is filled in, the SIS command mksiimage is invoked to actually build the image.

In addition to building an image, you can use tksis or mksiimage to delete images as well. Images can take a fair amount of disk space, so if you end up with images that you aren't using, you can delete them to recover some space.

2.9.2 Managing SIS clients

Much like the OSCAR image creation, the <Define OSCAR Clients> button actually invokes a tksis panel. There are a couple of SIS commands that are used to manage the client definitions. mksirange is used to define a group of clients. More importantly, mksimachine can be used to update client definitions. If, for example, you needed to change the MAC address after replacing one of your clients, you could use mksimachine.

2.9.3 Maintaining your client software

There are many different ways to maintain the software installed on the client nodes. Since SIS is image based, it allows you to also use an image based maintenance scheme. Basically, you apply updates and patches to your images and then resync the clients to their respective images. Since rsync is used, only the actual data that has changed will be sent over the network to the client. The SIS command updateclient can be run on any client to initiate this update.

2.9.4 Additional information

To obtain more detailed information about SIS, please refer to the many man pages that are shipped with SIS. Some of the more popular pages are:

You can also access the mailing lists and other docs through the sisuite home page, http://sisuite.org/.

root 2002-11-08