On Sun, 9 Feb 2003, Rob Roschewsk wrote: > What other alternatives are there for imaging a large number of machines and > do minor customization on them like hostname and IP address? > > Kickstart is nice .. but getting the developers I work with to document the > install of there application so I can integrate it is becoming a chore. I > would like something where I can take a snapshot of a box and deploy that to > many other boxes. > > Considered developing something myself .... like making tar balls of the > file systems and deploying those but figured I would ask the question and > see if there was anything else. There is systemimimager. I have a rather crude installer that does much what you want. I boot a floppy containing an etherboot rom (because I've not managed to get any of my builtin bootroms to boot). The linuxrc mounts my installer via nfs from the DHCP-supplied server, partitions /dev/hda by piping hot commands into fdisk, creates the filesystems, mounts them and untars my standard filesystem over it. It then does some Bebian-specific stuff. I use a standard kernel, not a special boot kernel, and when the installation is complete, the target system is up and running without a reboot. I can create a basic firewall system, including mail and squid proxy, in about ten minutes on a Pentium II 266, 64 Mbytes of RAM. The install runs almost as quickly on a Pentium, 100 Mhz, 32 Mbytes. It's written in standard bash scripts. Customisation is by changing scripts. Of course, you could customise it to get the customisation information any way you want. If the installation console is a serial port, inittab is altered to run a getty on it. My preferred discussion forum is via the list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb -- Please, reply only to the list.
