Several stand-alone boxes

[danny@maxwell.ucsf.EDU]

We are in the process of setting up several stand-alone intel boxes
running debian linux.  Have other users come up with good solutions to
the following:

1.	Maintaining uniform installations without nfs-mounting a
	common filesystem.  We'd rather have redundant /usr
	filesystems than have our machines freeze after each hiccup on
	the net.  Is there a way to turn the output of "dpkg -l" into
	a useable script for reproducing one machine's setup on
	another?

2.	Distributing important /etc files without NIS.  We'd rather
	not run NIS, and figure on using rdist+DNS instead.  Has anyone
	made this work with the "passwd" program, or even with shadow
	passwords?  We think that for a relatively small network NIS
	introduces too much confusion (vis-a-vis DNS) to be
	worthwhile.


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Danny Heap, UCSF, 3333 California St., Room 102, SF CA, 94118
danny@maxwell.ucsf.edu, voice:	(415) 476-8910, fax: (415) 476-1508
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