Peter Eckersley wrote: > On Mon, Dec 25, 2000 at 12:15:50AM -0800, Erik Winn wrote:
> > Here is the first obstacle - not really a big one, but I spent all day > > digging around and couldn't really find any tools for this one: we want to > > be > > able to clone the machines easily over the local net. Mandrake has a tricky > > boot floppy that asks only for the eth0 config and then runs a bunch of > > perl > > to do the rest of the install non-interactively. I haven't started reading > > the scripts yet (that's plan B), instead I was hoping that someone had come > > up with something similar for debian. We are looking at hundreds of boxes > > already and its really just begun. > > This was extremely difficult for us at first, simply because the > hardware we got was so variable that no "standard install" was really > possible. There was one small shipment of machines with identical disks > which we cloned using dd :). > > Things have got much better lately, since we started receiving corporate > donations of largeish groups of modern PCs with similar hardware. The > way we've ended up doing it is this: > > * A debian mirror server > * Customised task packages > > So we start a normal debian install, but then pick > task-computerbank-whatever and it's done. I've made the current version of our task packages apt-get'able if you want to have a look: deb http://thingy.apana.org.au/computerbank/debian cbv/ deb-src http://thingy.apana.org.au/computerbank/debian cbv/ They are mainly proof-of-concept at the moment and need considerable development, but they are already making life much easer for us. > A custom task package might play really well with an automated > installer, if your hardware is sufficiently uniform to support one. As someone else pointed out there's the FAI project at <http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/> We still have to evaluate it properly but looks like it could be a very useful package for us. Frank