Philip Prindeville wrote:
I was wondering what would be involved in adding steps to
a build DVD where additional per-user customization is done.
I would not be installing off optical media. I would install off the
network.
Since the company does a poor job of tracking which PC's
(and their associated MAC addresses) are given out to which
users (new hires especially), it's hard to discover (via LDAP
queries, for instance) what user name owns a PC, what resources
should be preconfigured on it (such as SMB share volumes, etc).
So I was thinking of adding a step where a pop-up (or series of
pop-ups) prompts the user for things like:
* his AD domain;
* his AD username (different from his UNIX name);
* his AD password;
* his desired MS networking shares;
* his Wifi SSIDs and associated Radius information
etc, etc.
Is there an easy way to do this? Are there any examples out
there of someone doing this?
Would it be something that could be easily added into
Anaconda via script-extensions?
Is it acceptable for the person who places the box in the target
location and plugs it in to also boot it and make some configuration
choices?
I've not timed an install on current hardware, but I used to install RHL
7.3 in under 15 minutes off a LAN.
Anaconda isn't the only way to deploy Linux, there are also third-party
solutitions such as System Imager which is based on the notion you
install one system, get it "just so," and then clone it.
I can imagine different groups having different software requirements;
those could be handled in Anaconda by loading custom ks files from a web
server, and the web server could use CGI (or similar) to generate the
appropriate setup:
ks=http://ks.example.com/cgi/redfish.ks?department=accounts&essid=watsit&wep=s:bigsecret
or whatever
Note that wireless (and lots of other) configuration (and extra
packages) can be don in %post using tools such as sed, cp, mv and grep.
If you need to ask questions, look at dialog and xdialog (there may be
more variants too).
btw I'd be reluctant to put user-specific information on a machine
(except a laptop): access to network facilities should require a network
(such as LDAP/AD) signon. On Windows, we have users' home directories on
a server, and they're cached on the PC the user logs in on. If they use
a different PC next time, that's fine.
--
Cheers
John
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