On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 10:43:20PM -0400, Chris Wagner wrote: > At 07:29 PM 5/16/00 -0400, Jeremy Hansen wrote: > >Autoinstall (Red Hat's kickstart) > > This is also something fairly important. We need this as we do a > > lot of mass installs. > > For mass installs, just make a standard issue CD, boot from that CD, > and copy over the OS. Or you could even make a disk image and dd it > onto the hard drive. That assumes you have the same hard drive in all > the machines. You can turn a 20GB drive into a 10GB drive. :) But > even if you have 4 or 5 different hard drives in your organization, > using disk images will still save you tons of time.
even better, you can make a tar.gz image of your "standard install", stick it on an nfs server and then create a boot floppy with nfs support. when building a new box, boot with the floppy, partition the disk (scriptable using sfdisk), mount the nfs drive, untar the archive, and then run a script which customises whatever needs to be customised (e.g. hostname, IP address, etc). then run lilo to make it bootable from the hard disk. alternatively, put it on a CD-ROM and make that CD bootable - just insert the CD and reboot for a fully-automated install. say 10 meg or so for boot kernel & utilities, leaves you up to around 640MB of compressed tar.gz containing your standard install file-system image. btw, this tar.gz idea is how the debian base system is installed on a machine in the first place. the only significant difference is that you're installing your own tar.gz system image rather than the standard base.tar.gz. automating debian installs is pretty easy - IF you have a good understanding of how debian works. craig -- craig sanders
