debian on cluster

[Ulrich Kerzel <kerzel@ekp.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de>]

Hello,

	we are considering installing Debian on a cluster of 30 or so linux-boxes.
One striking argument would be to have updates done via apt automatically.

Our idea is that one machine (the administrator's box) would be the master, i.e. all packages 
are downloaded from this machine and installed using apt. Then the newly downloaded
packages would be moved to our local mirror using the apt-move tool. All other machines would
be the slaves automatically installing the newly available package from the local mirror.
My question is therefore, how to do this efficiently?
I was thinking of putting the local mirror in /etc/apt/sources.list and having some
cron-job doing apt-get update/install.
But: How to tell the slaves that a package should be installed which hasn't been istalled previously?
     How to deal with the situation that debconf sometimes requires some user-interaction? Can
         the slave somehow get the configuration from the master?

Cheers,

Ulrich