SystemImager 3.9.6 (-unstable) released

SystemImager is software which automates Linux installs, software distribution, and production deployment.

SystemImager makes it easy to do automated installs (clones), software distribution, content or data distribution, configuration changes, and operating system updates to your network of Linux machines. You can even update from one Linux release version to another!

The 3.9.6 release is the second release candidate of 4.0.0. We would like to point to two new interesting features:

1) the possibility to define dynamic host groups
2) the introduction of the "priority" attribute for host groups

The first new feature is very important in terms of interoperability between SystemImager and external applications, for example to use the same groups defined in a job scheduler or with another installation/management sysadmin tool. You must only define all the groups in SystemImager by si_clusterconfig(8) and for each group specify the external command to execute (script, binary or whatever) to generate the corresponding list of clients.

The new priority attribute can be very useful if a client belongs to multiple groups: in this case the group with the higher priority (lower value) is used to get the image to be deployed on that node. Overrides belonging to the different groups will be distributed in reverse order or priority: in case of file overlaps first hit wins.

A different behaviour, respect to the previous versions, is that now systemconfigurator is used to re-generate also the boot-loader configuration at the end of the imaging process (don't worry... a backup copy of the previous file ".pre-systemimager" is created before!). The big advantage of this approach is that it allows to automatically resolve the boot-loader problems when you change the partitioning schema in autoinstallscript.conf and you reinstall your clients. A side-effect of this is that you can loose some entries previously defined in the boot-loader config, but if you don't like this approach you can always write a post-install script to move the ".pre-systemimager" config file to the real boot-loader configuration file, and continue to use the original (cloned) file.

There are also, as usual, the same list of bug fixes and other minor improvements.

You can download source and binary packages here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=259&package_id=37046&release_id=539089

The detailed changelog is available here:
http://svn.systemimager.org/filedetails.php?repname=systemimager&path=%2Ftags%2F3.9.6%2FCHANGE.LOG&rev=0&sc=0

You can find information about our email lists, IRC, bug reports, etc at: http://www.systemimager.org.

Have fun! ;-)
-the SystemImager team