Re: debian pxe dhcp netinstall (debconf enterprise fai etc.)
On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 08:21:29AM -0800, Paul Telford wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Chad Walstrom wrote:
>
> > I was intrigued by Progeny's autoinstall Python script, but never had a
> > chance to look into it further.
>
> Progeny no longer maintains autoinstall, but I have picked it up and
> continue to use, maintain, and enhance it. If you haven't looked at it in
> a while it might be worth revisiting. I uploaded a new version a month or
> two ago which fixes some of the deficiencies of previous versions.
I was sorry to hear that Progeny had abandoned autoinstall. It had
apparently neglected for a while, though, so I wasn't very surprised. It
really is quite good, and could have been even better, I think.
> I also received a comment from a user last week stating that they are
> using autoinstall with PXE and it is working great. I'm using autoinstall
> via a single 1.44M floppy every day to deploy various machines and it all
> works as expected -- my machines are up and running in just a few minutes,
> completely hands-free.
Last year I used autoinstall to turn about a 100 old PC's into X
terminals. With autoinstall and discover, I was able to get completely
non-interactive installs.
I used grub, though instead of PXE. (Most of the hardware was old, and
very few, if any, of the the NIC's supported PXE.) grub can be built
with network support, and it supported all the NIC's we had. It also
loads the kernel and filesystem from the network faster than from
floppy. :)
---Nathan
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