Tayloring Debian Installs

[Thomas Lamy <Thomas.Lamy@netwake.de>]

Hi,

some days ago I had the task of setting up 6 debian servers for our web
server farm. It was rather boring to do the base install, alter the apt.conf
and sources.list (we run a combo of testing/stable), de-select unwanted
default packages (you know the score...).

I'd like to streamline that task, as there are another 10 servers next month
that need the same procedure.

In SuSE, it was an easy task, as you could save the state of installed
packages on a running machine, and inject that at the base install stage, so
there were only custom packes (and configuration) left.

I thought it would be the easiest way to use tasksel for that, but I didn't
find a way to import external data (even hand-made) to define a new "task".

Another thought was to use some netinstall iso, and tweak it (alter the
basedebs.tar, sources.list) to my needs.

HD cloning is not really an option, as most times the source HDD won't match
the new ones, and I'd also like to use this procedure to convert the rest of
the SuSE machines here.

So, what are you using? 


Thomas