Hi all, On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Patrick Okui wrote:
> > what are my options for automating installation of 15 PCs (same > > hardware)? I want to avoid installing them 1 by 1, or having to burn > > 15 cd's. > > In addition to the already excellent suggestions, you could try g4l > (sourceforge and google should bring up a hit). > > You basically download the g4l bootable iso, get one machine setup the > way you want, boot the other machines off the g4l disk (disk only needs > to be in drive for boot, so you don't need 15cds) and select multicast > client. I've just posted some more detailed instructions here: http://blog.aptivate.org/2010/07/22/free-system-imaging-using-g4l/ as there's unfortunately no main website for G4L. > We've used this to install 40 machines in an AfNOG lab. We used the disk > block copy option (rather than partition) so to make this faster we > dd'ed /dev/zero across the entire disk (off an ubuntu bootable cd) so it > didn't try to multicast extra empty space. Strictly speaking, we dd'ed the disks to make them blank before installing the operating system. This allows the disk images to compress better, so that they copy faster over the network and/or use less space on the FTP server, because the empty blocks are empty and not filled with random junk from the previous operating system installation. > This method is antagonistic to what operating system(s) you install on > the master Did you mean antagonistic, or agnostic? :) Cheers, Chris. -- Aptivate | http://www.aptivate.org | Phone: +44 1223 760887 The Humanitarian Centre, Fenner's, Gresham Road, Cambridge CB1 2ES Aptivate is a not-for-profit company registered in England and Wales with company number 04980791. _______________________________________________ LUG mailing list [email protected] http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/lug LUG is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/ All Archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ The above comments and data are owned by whoever posted them (including attachments if any). The List's Host is not responsible for them in any way. ---------------------------------------
