Re: Large-scale debian installation, request help

[Ganesan Rajagopal <rganesan@novell.com>]

Hi,

Thanks everybody who have taken their time to reply. Looking at the
responses, I am going to take the following approach for installation

1. Start with getting a DHCP server configured and running. 
2. Install one client machine with the required configuration (getting
hostname, ip address etc via dhcp).
3. Install a new kernel on the client with support for all the network cards
that I have.
4. Duplicate this client installation on all the other machines.

I am not going to use nfs-root because all these machines already have a
hard disk and it seems logical to use it instead of loading the network. 

I now have to figure out how to do step 4. The disks are not identical, so I
cannot for example, dd from disk one to another. I guess I'll just write a
script to tar the partition(s) and untar it on another machine over nfs.
I'll post my experiences to the list after I manage to do all this :-). 

I think a debian installation disk which can use DHCP to get most of the
configuration information in addition to host name and ip address (for eg
partitioning info, location of a nfs server with debian distribution etc) 
would be a interesting package to work on. 

Wow, that would be real nice, configure an appropriate server, put the
floppy inside, no questions asked and the installation over in 10 minutes
over nfs :-). Then, when some one in my office wants to install Linux on a
fresh machine, I'll ask him to put the floppy in and let it go to work!.

I am not a debian developer yet, planning to sign on in the near future
:-). When I do sign up, this is one of "dream" packages I would work on
;-). 

Ganesan

--
R. Ganesan (rganesan@novell.com)       | Ph: 91-80-5721856 Ext: 2149
Novell India Development Center.       | #include <std_disclaimer.h>