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Need to clone machines efficiently - help?



Hi Folks,

 I have just started working with a group here in Portland that is taking in 
old machines and recycling them - putting linux on as the OS (of course ;}). 
See http://www.freegeek.org for more. Its a non-profit all volunteer thing; 
and actually one of the people has posted to one of these lists before ... 
but, apparently things kinda (lamely, IMO) drifted toward a mandrake system 
-- I think I can turn that around with a little help; I am putting in some 
good time there and I think that when the realities of maintaining and 
upgrading rpm systems hits they may change their minds.

 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 is really not a huge task - it would just make a nice splash over here 
if we could come up with something ...

 I would greatly appreciate recieving help/ideas/advice on this - Note 
however that I am not actually subscribed to the list at present (sorry, just 
too much at the moment ) so you can reply to me personally if you like.

 Thanks very much in advance! I hope we can get this to happen.

Erik Winn



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