Interesting job...I like these ones.
I got dumped a job with 5 half-dead solaris machines running something written in tcl/tk talking to something on an NFS share (yuck but anyway). The hardware is a write-off obviously. The newest machine is 2002. Someone attempted to move this to Linux in ~2003 and failed miserably as I found some Red Hat 9 media floating around and a couple of laptops with it on in the cupboard. They had no idea about Linux or tcl/tk.
This needs to remain airgapped and there is limited budget to fix it and what isn't being spent is going in my pocket :) ... I've already got some recycled HP8000 workstations they had lying around and TFTs going in, one of which is going to be a postgresql/backup server for this and a new 100baseT network switch (rather than 10base2!)
From a software perspective, the user will be auto-logged-in and get a WM with this app running holding the x session open and that is it. The code has already been mostly fixed to work with recent tcl/tk versions and the NFS back end is being ripped out now by myself and ported to a one-table postgresql solution. Backups are going to be done onto an 160Gb DLT on the primary node.
Next bit is major the software problem. I've got lots of production experience with CentOS and Debian but this is airgapped so no yum, no apt-get, nothing. Does anyone have any tips on which one of these is likely more suitable for totally airgapped operation and what strategy I can use for rolling point updates out? I've got media access via CD/DVD only by the looks. I'm not allowed to connect any kit to the LAN and media has to be scanned and checked as it comes in and is destroyed or filed - nothing leaves (defence sector for you - you have no idea how hard it was to get the code to start with!).
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