5 Overview of System Installation Suite (SIS)

The first question you may have is ``what is SIS?''. The System Installation Suite (SIS) is a cluster installation tool developed by the collaboration of the IBM Linux Technology Center and the SystemImager team. SIS was chosen to be the installation mechanism for OSCAR for multiple reasons:

In order to understand some of the steps in the upcoming install, you will need knowledge of the main concepts used within SIS. The first concept is that of an image. In SIS, an image is defined for use by the cluster nodes. This image is a copy of the operating system files stored on the server. The client nodes install by replicating this image to their local disk partitions. Another important concept from SIS it the client definition. A SIS client is defined for each of your cluster nodes. These client definitions keep track of the pertinent information about each client. The server node is responsible for creating the cluster information database and for servicing client installation requests. The information that is stored for each client includes:

Each of these pieces of information will be discussed further as part of the detailed install procedure.

For additional information on the concepts in SIS and how to use it, you should refer to the SIS(1) man page. In addition, you can visit the SIS web site at http://sisuite.org/ for recent updates.

root 2002-11-08