Partition Policy

The partitions are initialized and formated with "parted". The particular scheme used is given in the debut.sh script wich is transferred over by http to the initrd installation system. 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 /tftpboot 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 /tftpboot.

For the G4 machines we have implemented one uniform scheme across all machines. The partitions are Mac style partitions and so 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. Thus we use 10 for swap and 11 for the linux root. 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. Thus our installer program ASSUMES that it can wipe out partitions 10 and 11, recreate them and format them as linux swap and ext2fs respectively

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

It does however, depend entirely on the cooperation of the system administrators in maintaining this policy.

Peter