Re: redesigning the debian installer
On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 10:47:20AM +0200, Sebastien Chaumat wrote:
> Let me explain replicator's point of view. We assume that we want to
> install 99% identical contents on all of our computers
> (classrooms, desktops computers in our lab). So we use rsync to
> speed things up and, at the end of the install we do the 1% leaving job.
You need a decent network for that. That's not always available. It is
nice if you have it though.
> Partitionning is auto-scalable to handle different harddisks sizes.
Very nice feature. I still have to check (and grab :) the code. BTW: iirc
replicator is only available as .deb. Is there a source package somewhere?
> We recommend cfengine in post-installation (as a front end to apt if we
> want to deal with packages).
I have to say that I partly hate and partly love cfengine. We are configuring
our systems using it but I am looking for an alternative. Some utility that
is better suited for editing config files...
> It's a lot (really) faster than unpacking packages.
Depends on the network ;) Unpacking is quite fast on our systems here but
configuring takes a lot of time...
> Using grub on our magical bootdisk allow to use a single floppy for all
> the target computers.
Can you explain what you mean with this? Not that I am against using grub...
> Replicator as been designed for Debian 2.1 and 2.2. We would be pleased
> to include it into Woody. We are moving to sourceforge to open
> devellopement so all good willing are welcome to help improving it. It's
You aren't a Debian developer?
> already used in production environment. We want to implement class based
> install.
Nice, another feature I would need. Sadly (or luckily, depends on POV) I
can't test it here since our systems are working fine for over a year now.
Perhaps I will accidently wipe the disks so that I can test the installer
there ;)
cu
Torsten
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