Re: [Astlinux-users] new image format

[Kristian K. <kri...@gm...>]

On 1/15/07, Terry Markovich <tm...@be...> wrote:
>
> Kristian,
>
> Really just wondering if you had something imminent.  For upgrading my
> appliance, I think I will have a boot partition with a kernel (with all
> needed drivers builtin) and a filesystem in an initrd, which will
> immediately execute an upgrade script.  That way I can then overwrite my
> CF disk with a new partition image (leaving the boot partition in
> place).
>
> Terry
>

Terry,

  Star2Star is (and has been using) a runnix/astlinux/syslinux/kexec
based bootloader for quite some time.  However, I haven't made the
specific configuration available because a) I want to make some
improvments first and b) because we control the entire appliance and
network, I can be much more certain that I'm not forgetting something
and someone's data might go missing, etc.

  It's been working quite well.

  Here is what we are doing:

- Partition CF card with one 128mb FAT16 partition.  This holds
syslinux, runnix, and full ext2 AstLinux disk images (actually more
than that - they are identical to the .img files already created)

- CF boots, syslinux boots runnix

- runnix looks for a "good" AstLinux image and boots it.  If none is
found, it connects to our provisioning server (runnix supports
dhcp/ssh/wget/etc/etc) and downloads, verifies, installs and boots the
new AstLinux image.  It oarses a config file for this info.

  Runnix has been at 0.1 since I created it in August last year.  I
need some more time to work on it!  Maybe you'd like to help? :)

-- 
Kristian Kielhofner