Xandros Desktop Management Server Illustrates a Maturing Linux Market
Enabling and Scheduling Remote Installations
Bill von Hagen
Thursday, January 6, 2005 10:32:45 AM
The xDMS Console application enables you to define the Installable
Units and updates that your xDMS server provides within your
enterprise environment. To do this, you start xDMS Console, select the
Schedule tab, and click the new icon. This displays the wizard shown
in Figure 4.
The characteristics of a scheduled job are its name, what you're doing
(OS deployment, updates, etc.), what you're installing to do that, the
MAC or IP addresses of hosts on which this can be installed, and the
period of time that the job is valid for. If you're scheduling an
operating system deployment, the wizard also prompts you for the root
password on the remote systems, and how the installation should
interact with the disks on those systems.
The ability to specify a range of IP addresses on which a distribution
can be installed or updated and the time frame for those installs makes
it easy for a system administrator to remote install certain
distributions on specific subnets, schedule updates to occur at
off-peak times, and so on.
After scheduling a job, you can go to any system with a valid MAC
address or within the range of valid IP addresses, insert the boot
media you created in the Repository Builder, and boot the machine
from that media in order for xDMS to do its installation. Figure 5
shows a sample boot screen when booting from an xDMS boot
image. Figure 6 shows a sample screen shot taken while a remote
installation is taking place.
Information about the status of each remote installation is displayed
in the window at the bottom of the xDMS console. This makes it easy to
see what systems have been installed successfully, and any systems on
which installation errors occurred.
Once a remote installation has completed successfully, you simply
remove the boot media and reboot the system. All systems installed
using xDMS include a desktop icon for the xDMS console, which makes it
easy for authenticated administrators to retrieve updates and other
packages from an xDMS server in the future.
Next: Authentication and Delegation in xDMS »
