Re: Debian vs Red Hat??? I need info.

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 10:43:20PM -0400, Chris Wagner wrote:
> At 07:29 PM 5/16/00 -0400, Jeremy Hansen wrote:
> >Autoinstall (Red Hat's kickstart)
> > This is also something fairly important.  We need this as we do a
> > lot of mass installs.
>
> For mass installs, just make a standard issue CD, boot from that CD,
> and copy over the OS.  Or you could even make a disk image and dd it
> onto the hard drive.  That assumes you have the same hard drive in all
> the machines.  You can turn a 20GB drive into a 10GB drive. :) But
> even if you have 4 or 5 different hard drives in your organization,
> using disk images will still save you tons of time.

even better, you can make a tar.gz image of your "standard install",
stick it on an nfs server and then create a boot floppy with nfs
support.  

when building a new box, boot with the floppy, partition the disk
(scriptable using sfdisk), mount the nfs drive, untar the archive, and
then run a script which customises whatever needs to be customised (e.g.
hostname, IP address, etc). then run lilo to make it bootable from the
hard disk.

alternatively, put it on a CD-ROM and make that CD bootable - just
insert the CD and reboot for a fully-automated install. say 10 meg or so
for boot kernel & utilities, leaves you up to around 640MB of compressed
tar.gz containing your standard install file-system image.


btw, this tar.gz idea is how the debian base system is installed on a
machine in the first place. the only significant difference is that
you're installing your own tar.gz system image rather than the standard
base.tar.gz.

automating debian installs is pretty easy - IF you have a good
understanding of how debian works.

craig

--
craig sanders