Thanks go to the following who endorse RIS with a range from
'waste of diskspace' to 'we use it ALL the time'.
Richard Rogers
Alan Rollow
Tom Blinn
Paul Henderson
Richard Bemrose
Bernt Christandl
Apart from DMS, which is close to what I had in mind, there are no
alternatives.
""RIS installs (and updates) are often faster than working from CDROM
media directly. You can eat a fair amount of disk space if you put
lots of kits on line, but disks are relatively cheap and chasing
after the CDROM kits is a real nuisance.""
""I install every interim baselevel of the current OS build each week
using RIS. It is about three times as fast as installing from CD
(depending on network load), and provides the same interface,
functionality, and look/feel. If you are going to do several systems,
you can do them in parallel, instead of waiting for one to finish so
you can use the CD on the next. You can also apply configuration
templates that help you clone system configurations.""
These comments are sufficient motivation for me to invest more time
investigating RIS but...
When I get a new Sun, I bung it on the net, run
'boot - net install' and 90 minutes later I have Solaris running with
ALL packages (old, current and new versions) available on NFS automount.
(At some point (not so) soon this will also work for Linux)
DU + RIS does not appear to offer the flexibility that I have become
accustomed to with Solaris and our home grown package management system
but does manage the doconfig.
Clearly my existing package system works for third party software and
will work for many layered products but for compilers and the like I
guess that I shall have to work out how to integrate RIS into my pkg.db.
Salut maintenant!
k.mcmanus_at_gre.ac.uk -
http://www.gre.ac.uk/~k.mcmanus
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Kevin McManus ||
School of Computing & Math Science ||
The University of Greenwich ||
Wellington St. Woolwich ||Tel +44 (0)181 331 8719
London SE18 6PF UK ||Fax +44 (0)181 331 8665
Received on Thu Jun 18 1998 - 12:25:08 NZST