rdist

Alex Dyas alex.dyas at interoute.com
Thu Jul 6 16:07:17 BST 2006


Jeff LaCoursiere wrote:
> 
> [Sorry if you are seeing this twice - it was pointed out to me that my bad
> habit of replying to a list message and rewriting the subject is bad for
> thread tracking :) ]
> 
> Howdy,
> 
> I suppose this is not a FreeBSD specific question, though the equipment
> involved is all FreeBSD based.  I guess I am looking for some design
> advice.
> 
> I run a bunch of FreeBSD based Internet terminals on a bunch of mini-ITX
> motherboards and custom cases (by the way I have about 700 of these things
> and am selling them if anyone is interested).  My partner and I wrote the
> "interface", which is a hacked wdm (to authenticate the customer, who
> types in the secret PIN number on the back of a scratch-off phone card),
> and a highly customized fvwm that only allows a few applications (and
> looks amazingly like Windows XP).  All of this is working great.
> 
> Now we have a new version, and we also have new constraints.  First, we
> have had trouble with the 2.5" laptop hard drives failing (the terminals
> are in bars and restaurants in the US Virgin Islands, where it is both hot
> and extremely humid!).  So I have new 1GB flash drives on the way to see
> if it is more stable.  First challenge is to make FBSD+X+utilities fit in
> 1GB with at least 200MB of swap.  Lets assume that that is possible.  What
> I will end up with is a subset of the standard release plus our stuff.
> 
> Whew!  Now to the question.  How to distribute this new version?  Today I
> make a new terminal by installing FBSD6.0-R and dumping a tar image of my
> "master" onto it (literally a tar from / minus dev, proc, etc).  This is
> fine because I have 40GB to play with, over 90% of which will never be
> used.  This won't work with the 1GB flash drive, obviously, as stuff needs
> to be automatically deleted.
> 
> So I have been thinking that rdist might be a good candidate, and may give
> me additionally the ability to do "automatic" upgrades, if a cron job or
> something could fire off rdist at midnight every night or something.
> Anyone (Alan?) have experience using rdist to synch the actual OS tree?
> Or something better?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> j

Something I've been wanting to mess about with for a while is a 
combination of dd and netcat for doing this sort of thing.

http://www.rajeevnet.com/hacks_hints/os_clone/os_cloning.html

May not be relevant in this case (you would probably need to boot the 
client from some other device to do it?), but worth considering.

Cheers,

Alex
-- 
-= Alex Dyas - UNIX - Interoute - Geneva =-




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