<quote who="DaZZa"> > I'm in a situation where I need to duplicate on a mass basis - to the > order or 3000-5000 units - a Linux setup off a headless box. > > All the destination boxes will be identical in specification, and the same > as the original. At this point (trial - only 15 to do), I've made an image > of the disk using DD to a USB attached drive - which works, and gets the > new boxes working, but takes 3+ hours to dump the image back to the new > boxes. > > 3+ hours over 5000 machines is not really acceptable. :-)
You've gone down the imaging route when you *probably* should have gone down the automated installation route. Here's why: Pretty much every distro has some form of automated installation system. Red Hat (and Fedora) have kickstart, Debian has debconf preseeding, while Ubuntu actually has both (it translates from kickstart into preseed, so you can use similar tools to deploy Ubuntu as you use with Red Hat). Once the automated installs are complete, you can execute a configuration management tool such as puppet or cfengine to make local customisations. One obvious use of this is to ensure network settings are correct (and in many cases, unique). A massive advantage of using a configuration management tool is that you can roll out changes to some or all of the machines really easily, based on a centralised change management scheme. The best bit? Next time you do an auto install of a machine, it will be as up to date as all the others, straight away, and you don't have to keep on regenerating a binary image. Rock on, - Jeff -- OSCON 2008: Portland OR, USA http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/ "No shit, [EMAIL PROTECTED]" - Mr. Bad -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
