remote install on 100+ workstations?
The computer science department at my university has many Linux
boxes. Say, on the order of 100. Almost all these boxes run
RedHat (not Debian, but read on).
I don't like RedHat that much: for example, RedHat 7.0 ships
with broken kernel headers, an unreleased and unsupported version of
the gcc compiler, and a glibc version on which gcc will only compile
after applying patches (these patches complicate life by changing, in
an architecture-dependent way, header files which get put in
architecture-independent places).
I would like to investigate replacing RedHat with Debian.
The current rationale for using RedHat is that there exists a
mechanism for installing/upgrading many RedHat boxes, in a customized
way, over the network. This mechanism is called "kickstart". I don't
know much about it. I don't know if a similar mechanism exists for
Debian. However, I suspect that it does.
My question, then, is this: does anyone have (or know of) a mechanism
which will allow us to install Debian remotely on a hundred+ boxes,
including department-specific customizations, such as patches and
non-Debian files? Given that we are a research environment,
administered by some pretty clueful people, our linux installations
will necessarily be very customized. So something like 'apt-get', by
itself, is not good enough as I know it.
Finally, I think I've seen posts about this on this list before, but
I'm not having any luck finding them via the archives search
engine. So I apologize if it turns out that this topic has already
been beaten to death on this list in the past (I've been off the list
for a while, owing to its high volume).
cheers,
chris
Reply to: