Re: Non-interactive installation

[Drake Diedrich <Drake.Diedrich@anu.edu.au>]

On Tue, Nov 24, 1998 at 06:37:49PM +0100, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> 
> Where can I find information about non-interactive installation of
> Debian (if there is any)?  I am particularly interested in installing a

   I just sent a post to beowulf about the choices (none optimal) on Debian. 
For initial installation disk mirroring is probably easiest.  Install one
node normally, then tar up the disk, put it on an NFS server, and use the 
rescue disk on the other machines to mount and untar the image.  Edit
/etc/init.d/network to have a unique IP number.  This is probably the fastest
way to install a cluster from scratch.
    Upgrading an installed Debian cluster is a bit more difficult.
There are at least 4 ways to avoid answering postinst questions.

1) Repack the Debs with non-interactive postinsts.
2) Install only non-interactive debs (choose carefully, experiment)
3) dpkg --unpack (run necessary bits by hand.. eg. ldconfig)
4) apt-get --yes (unly if the answers are really yes)

   As an alternative to mirroring you can use dpkg --[sg]et-selections, but
that doesn't protect you from all the configuration questions.