Jim Lawson's weblog

So I've been working on the new webservers. We recently (in December...) placed an order for six SunFire v240s. I had planned to get them online before the students came back, but other projects have been taking up time. More on those when/if I make entries for them.

Anyway, in my last entry (which I made when Mike wanted me to try out my new blog he had just created) I made a refrerence to Solaris flash archives.

Flash archives basically let you take an image of an existing system and deploy it across multiple systems. If you combine it with Jumpstart,
you can automatically deploy this image onto Sun hardware from the boot prom.

In practice, I'm finding it to be a bit of a pain to set up. It makes me wish I could run the web farm on Linux and just use Systemimager, which is a dream come true. You NT admins may think Norton/Symantec Ghost is pretty cool, but until you've seen Systemimager and the way it takes advantage of differential copies using rsync, you haven't seen anything.

Flash Archives apparrently have a "differential archive" feature that might approach something like this, but you have to keep the old image around, whereas with SystemImager you just start another rsync.

Solaris fans are welcome to try to show me the light. Maybe I'm just a Linux bigot.