Yesterday at 2:26pm, Carl Youngblood said: >What is a good way to prepare linux system images and deploy them on a >number of identical machines?
A large cluster I work with at the UofU (about 200 machines, www.emulab.net) uses something their team wrote and released called Frisbee. It is very fast (it beats the pants off of norton/symantec Ghost, and everything else we've tried), and is designed for multicast, so it can do all of them at once (they don't need to start at the same time). You can run it off of a boot CD, you could boot off a floppy and run it, or the way they do it is with DHCP+PXE. It also comes with a set of tools for making and manipulating disk images. The images are considerably smaller than what most other imagers will produce. (See the paper linked below for details.) Since releasing it (GPL), there have been quite a few groups, including large corporations, who have started using it heavily. IMHO, it is very cool. Homepage: http://www.emulab.net/ Paper about Frisbee design and performance: "Fast, Scalable Disk Imaging with Frisbee" http://www.emulab.net/pubs.php3 Download the software, ISOs, etc.: http://www.emulab.net/software.php3 It's built for FreeBSD, and that's where it is used most of the time, but it also works with Linux too. Mac -- Mac Newbold MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.macnewbold.com/ ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
