Mass install / Autoinstall (Was: Re: Debian vs Red Hat??? I need info.)

[Bulent Murtezaoglu <bm@acm.org>]

[...]
    KMH>  The best way to do that that I've found so far is to set up
    KMH> a box with two removable hard drive racks, install and
    KMH> _configure_ everything on one drive, then use `cfdisk',
    KMH> `mkswap', and `mke2fs' to partition and format the second
    KMH> drive.  
[...]

I do a possibly non-kosher thing similar to the above.  I tar
everything up once it is set up and stick the tar file[s] into a 
SCSI drive.  I have a box that boots from this SCSI drive and has
IDE drawers and a kernel with IDE support built as modules.  I then
hot-swap IDE drives, sfdisk, mke2fs, mount and un-tar without bringing
down the machine.  Insmoding the ide modules after switching the
drives on and rmmoding before removing them seems to work fine.
Never lost a drive yet, but the largest drives I worked with under
this scheme were 4.3G.  With the newer/larger drives, you'd probably 
need to make sure LILO and the BIOS agree on a geometry for the drive 
to be actually bootable (dunno the incantation for that yet!).

cheers,

BM