addclients - assign clients to an image

addclients [ -help ] [ -version ] [ -host HOSTNAME ] [ -domainname DOMAINNAME ] [ -host-range X-Y ] [ -script SCRIPT ] [ -ip-range IP-IP ] [ -interactive YES|NO ]

This manual page documents briefly the addclients command.

addclients is a tool for mapping clients to a SystemImager image. There are three sections to the addclients utility:

1.

The first section is where you define what a hostname in your cluster looks like, and define a range of hostnames that you will associate with an image in the next section. (You should already have created the image for these clients to use by this point). Hostnames are of the form prefixnumber.domainname For example, if you specify "bogus.net" as your domainname, "node" as your base hostname, a starting number of 1 and an ending number of 10, you will have defined the following hosts:

node1.bogus.net

node2.bogus.net

node3.bogus.net

node4.bogus.net

node5.bogus.net

node6.bogus.net

node7.bogus.net

node8.bogus.net

node9.bogus.net

node10.bogus.net Note: Currently, addclients does not support hostnames with leading zeros (e.g. node09.bogus.net, instead of node9.bogus.net), but this will likely be added in a future release. One reason for making the no-padded-zeros method the default behavior is flexible cluster expansion. For example, if you had initially chosen node01 - node80 as your cluster range, and later decide to add 25 more nodes to your cluster, you will have to renumber all of your nodes to add another leading zero (i.e. node001 - node105).

2.

Section 2 is where you specify the image you want to assign to the hosts defined in section 1.

3.

Section 3 gives you the option of automatically generating (or just updating) entries in your hosts files. During an autoinstallation, a client will request a hosts file in order to determine its hostname from its IP address. An autoinstall client will attempt other methods for determining it's hostname, including DNS, so this is not always necessary. Once an entry for a host has been added, there is no need to complete this section for that host again (but doing so is harmless).

A summary of options is included below. By default, if an insufficient set of options is specified, addclients will fall back to an interactive mode. See -interactive below if you wish to alter this behavior.

-help

Show summary of options

-version

Display version and copyright information.

-host HOST

Base host name of the client(s) to be autoinstalled. Will be combined with "-host-range" to derive actual host names.

-domainname DOMAINNAME

If this option is used, DOMAINNAME will be appended to the client host name(s).

-host-range X-Y

Number range used to create a series of host names based on the -client option. For example, "-client www -range 1-3" will cause addclients to use www1, www2, and www3 as host names. If leading zeros are used, then host names will be padded with zeros. For example, "-client www -range 01-03" produces host names www01, www02, and www03. Padding hostnames with zeros is not recommended.

-ip-range IP0-IP1

The range of IP addresses to assign to your autoinstall clients. Where IP0 is the first IP address in the range and IP1 is the last ip address in the range.

-interactive YES|NO

This program will go interactive by default if domainname, host, host-range, and script are all specified.

If you specify YES here, then it will go interactive, even if all of these values are specified.

If you specify NO here, then it will not go interactive, even if it is missing some of the required values.

-script IMAGE

Master autoinstall script name (typically the imagename). Don't include the path or the .master extension.

getimage(8), mkdhcpserver(8), mkdhcpstatic(8)

More details can be found in the SystemImager manual.

This manual page was compiled by dann <<dannf@debian.org>> for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).