Re: Autoinstall.

["Stephen A. Witt" <sawitt@electra.rsc.raytheon.com>]

On Thu, 1 May 2003, William Fletcher wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The company I work for is looking for a way to install debian
> machines from cd (no floppies), with a specific setup, without internet
> access (the machines will however still be on a network).
>
> And, they need specific files which aren't in .debs.
>
> Could anyone please point me in the right direction?
>

What I have done is have a machine internal to our company intranet
(running Debian of course) be a Debian mirror and point all the other
Debian machines we use (about 50 or so) to that mirror (in their
/etc/apt/sources.list files). I used the 'mirror' package to create the
internal mirror as it works with the ftp proxy system we have. Most of
these machines are used for software development so we want to control
what versions of software are on the development machines to ensure
consistency, etc. It also helps to spread the network load as frequently
connections through the company gateway aren't as fast as internal
connections. Don't know if this would fit your needs or not.

Another option would be to create a custom CD set with the
specific packages you need. I've never done it, but it has been discussed
on this list and I believe there are tools available for doing this.