Please Note: This document is no longer the authoritative source for questions on how to set up SystemImager on the ACL here at Earlham College. Please check the Admin page (access restricted) for the now authoratative source.
This document was created with the intent to aid in the setup of the SystemImager service on the Computer Science Department's Advanced Computing Lab (ACL) machines. Although this document uses the ACL for its example, the techniques used in this setup should work in most if not all situations. For a more general (and possibly more official) explanation of the steps, please reffer to the manual.
Briefly, the goal of installing and using SystemImager on the ACL is to obtain a reliable method of syncronizing all 30+ machines that make up the ACL on a standard distribution of OS and Supported software. SystemImager uses rsync in a pull archetecture as the main transport mechanisim. SystemImager also is capable of serving up several different images to different machines. Both of these features make SystemImager a very good tool for the environment which we have were the specific hardware configurations are not always the same and may require different software to work. Also, the pull mechanisim is much quicker than the push mechanisim due to the ability of many systems to syncronize at the same time. Not only does SystemImager make maintaining the ACL much easier, it allso makes for easy re-installation of any of the machines, which noticably decreases the amount of people-hours required when adding a machine to the cluster or upgrading to a new OS. For a complete listing of the features of VA SystemImager, please reffer to the datasheet (in PDF form also avaliable from the SystemImager.org Documentation Page.
With that said, here's how we do things here in the CS Department...
The Imageserver:
The Golden-Client:
The Athena Cluster:
The ACL Cluster: