Partition Policy

The partitions are initialized and formated with "parted". The particular scheme used is given in the bootstrap.sh script wich is transferred over by http to the initrd installation program. This could be combined with cgi to provide per machine partition configuration. Since we already have a data representation of the cluster in the form of the $TFTPROOT directory tree, this seems the logical place to store per machine configuration information such as partition scheme. That is, within the IP named subdirs of $TFTPROOT.

One uniform partition scheme is used for all the G4 machines that make up the cluster. The partitions are Mac style partitions and can have up to 16 partitions defined. MacOS 9.x by default takes up the first nine, with the ninth being the actual data partition. Then partition 10 gets allocated and formatted as a linux swap partition and partition 11 as a ext2fs linux root partition. The disks are all at least 20 Gigabytes, and the system administrators have installed MacOS in such a way that it does not use more than the first 10 gigs. The installer program ASSUMES that it can wipe out partitions 10 and 11 if they exist and the recreate them as described above.

It does not touch any partitions below 10, and does not interfere at all with the functionality of the installed MacOS.

This should be considered 'local policy' and entirely dependent on the cooperation and assistance of the system administrators.

Peter