perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Jason Zurawski <>]

Hi Trey;

The community supplied documentation was for the previous version of the 
toolkit software (3.2.x), so there are bound to be differences between the 
underlying CentOS 5 and 6 operating systems.  If you are able to get this 
working, I would be happy to include any notes you make during the process 
into that document so it can be useful to others.  

Thanks;

-jason

On Jul 21, 2014, at 7:53 PM, Trey Dockendorf 
<>
 wrote:

> Jason,
> 
> Thanks, that does help.  The steps in that document are slightly different 
> than what I'm finding in the 3.3.2 image.  For example the ks file in that 
> PDF doesn't exist.
> 
> I found a kickstart file in isolinux/initrd.img, named 
> 'centos6-netinstall.cfg'.  Should that file and a CentOS 6.5 initrd be 
> enough to kickstart a perfsonar box as if it was NetInstalled?  I also 
> noticed the bulk of the NetInstall ISO's size is "images/install.img" but I 
> don't see it referenced in any of the cfg files or the kickstart file...so 
> likely some normal syslinux behavior being used that I'm just unfamiliar 
> with.
> 
> Thanks,
> - Trey
> 
> =============================
> 
> Trey Dockendorf 
> Systems Analyst I 
> Texas A&M University 
> Academy for Advanced Telecommunications and Learning Technologies 
> Phone: (979)458-2396 
> Email: 
> 
>  
> Jabber: 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jason Zurawski" 
>> <>
>> To: "Trey Dockendorf" 
>> <>
>> Cc: 
>> 
>> Sent: Monday, July 21, 2014 4:14:19 PM
>> Subject: Re: [perfsonar-user] PXE booting NetInstall & automated install
>> 
>> Hi Trey;
>> 
>> The perfSONAR project has found that everyone does things slightly
>> different, and as a result of that we try to make the toolkit as
>> fungible as possible to support all of the various approaches to
>> configuration management.  We know of people using puppet and
>> cfengine, they may be able to post recipes that are specific to
>> their use case.
>> 
>> I can note that engineers from Penn State provided us a very detailed
>> write up of the approach they took to netbooting images for their
>> statewide deployment, I have posted a PDF on this page:
>> 
>> http://psps.perfsonar.net/toolkit/use-cases.html
>> 
>> Hope this helps to get you started, and hopefully others can chime in
>> as well.
>> 
>> Thanks;
>> 
>> -jason
>> 
>> On Jul 21, 2014, at 4:58 PM, Trey Dockendorf 
>> <>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Is it possible to PXE boot the NetInstall CD, and if so does anyone
>>> have some steps on making the ISO into something that can be used
>>> with PXE?
>>> 
>>> I manage all my systems and all provisioning through Foreman, so it
>>> would be ideal if our PerfSONAR boxes could also be provisioned
>>> within Foreman.
>>> 
>>> Does PerfSONAR support any kind of automated installation, or is it
>>> feasible to install the software on top of a stock CentOS 6.5 host
>>> and have it function like it was installed via NetInstall method?
>>> It would be very useful if I could manage our PerfSONAR boxes
>>> using Puppet :)
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> - Trey
>>> 
>>> =============================
>>> 
>>> Trey Dockendorf
>>> Systems Analyst I
>>> Texas A&M University
>>> Academy for Advanced Telecommunications and Learning Technologies
>>> Phone: (979)458-2396
>>> Email: 
>>> 
>>> Jabber: 
>>>