PXE
As you have already noticed, I haven’t been posting as much lately mainly because I’ve been so tired when I get home from work. Probably the most difficult aspect of starting my new job is adjusting to the schedule. For the past year or so in college, I had been able to strategically sign up for classes such that I almost never had to be up before 10AM. Therefore getting the typical 8 hours of sleep or so meant going to bed on average between 1AM and 3AM every night. Now, of course, I’m on the rest of the world’s schedule. Even though Sun does offer considerable flexibility in the form of basically letting me set my own hours, I have somehow amazingly chosen to get to work earlier than most people at 8AM. Tack on a morning commute that sometimes takes up to an hour, and that means I leave home around 7:00. The reason that I do this though, is because I typically take 1.5 to 2 hours for lunch to go to the gym and/or play pickup ultimate frisbee. In order to get home at a reasonable time, if I get to work at 8AM then I can usually leave by 5:30 or 6PM.
In any case, even though I’m still very much a newbie, I’m starting to get slightly more involved at work. One of the tasks that is currently on my plate right now is setting up a system to completely automate the process of installing a number of different potential Linux distributions (i.e. Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, etc.) from a remote server. The reason for doing this is to streamline the testing process for a new server system. Essentially, the design goal for this system is that it ultimately needs to officially support not only Solaris, but also several different versions of Linux as well as Windows. In order to automate the test process, we need to be able to sequentially roll out an installation of some OS, test that OS, and then move onto the next supported OS. All of this needs to be completely hands-off so that the actual testing process can be done any time (e.g. overnight) and without any user intervention.
A typical system that would be used to accomplish this task is a PXE server which meshes DHCP services for dynamic network discovery and configuration with TFTP services for hosting OS images for automatic download and installation. Now from my own personal research, the concept does not seem terribly difficult. One caveat, though, is that PXE is not often used for completely hands-off installations (i.e. users often must select menu options, etc.) and of course things that seem conceptually simple are always more complicated to implement. Additionally:
- Before a few days ago I had never heard of PXE.
- My boss does not have any experience setting up PXE services either. (Of course that’s why it’s my job to research and carry out an action plan)
- None of the people in the Automation group that I work have experience setting up PXE servers.
Now all of these facts simply make it a challenging task and force me to be resourceful. I have already met with one person from the IT department that has some experience with PXE servers and actually has one set up that we might be able to leverage for our ultimate goal. Of course working with him could prove to be a problem. Because he’s an “IT person,” that means he’s never in his office, has too many things to do, and is needed by 40 other people all at the same time. In any case, we shall see how it goes.
