Re: Cloning

[Erich.Waelde@t-online.de (Erich Waelde)]

Hello,

checking the Debian Installation Guide for 'Automated Installs', it
reccommends FAI (homepage: http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/),
available as a debian package. I haven't used it myself, though.

Good luck,
Erich

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>From the FAI homepage

AI (Fully Automatic Installation) for Debian GNU/Linux

FAI is an automated installation tool to install Debian GNU/Linux on a
Linux Cluster or a bunch of different hosts. It's similar but better than
other tools like kickstart for Red Hat, yast and alice for SuSE, lui from
IBM or Jumpstart for SUN Solaris. 

You can take one or more virgin PCs, turn on the power and after a few
minutes Linux is installed, configured and running on the whole cluster,
without any interaction necessary. Thus it's a scalable method for
installing and updating a Beowulf cluster or a network of workstations
unattended with little effort involved. FAI uses the Debian distribution
and a collection of shell- and Perl-scripts for the installation process.
Changes to the configuration files of the operating system are made by
cfengine, shell and Perl scripts. Using FAI, unattended and fully automated
OS installations of several Linux clusters were performed. 

FAI's target group are system administrators who have to install Debian
onto one or even hundreds of computers. It's not only a tool for doing a
Cluster installation but a general purpose installation tool. It can be
used for installing a Beowulf cluster, a rendering farm, a web server farm,
or a linux laboratory or a classroom. Even installing a HPC cluster or a
GRID and fabric management can be realized by FAI. Large-scale linux
networks with different hardware and different installation requirements
are easy to establish using FAI and its class concept. Remote OS
installations, Linux rollout and mass installation are other topics for
FAI. 

FAI is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public
License, version 2.