Re: Need to clone machines efficiently - help?
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
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