On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 09:58:27PM -0800, Duane Powers said: > I'm considering dd as one alternative, but that's kinda bulky 'cuz it > requires physically removing each hard drive installing in "parent" and > imaging... I've looked at things like > ghost, but that doesn't seem to be an option... I know we've had this > discussion on the list before... I don't know if anyone has the details > on redhat's kickstart program, > and whether that is something that could be ported to debian... Any > suggestions?
I just got an UGLY idea... what about making a HUGE rpm with a complete Debian-install, with the configuration either as commands in the Deian-package (as little interactivity as possible) or as postinst-commands in the RPM-package or in the postinst-section of kickstart, and then install this debian-2.2.i386.rpm (etc) vai kickstart. Yes, this IS ugly, and I don't know if it will work. But it's dfinitely a dirty hack :) I have been working quite a lot with kickstart recently and it's a nice tool. The mkkickstart-command that comes with RH 6.2 is however useless and with lots of errors. Read the HOWTO instead. > Most (of our) engineers are not linux-compliant. Kickstart is not very easy to tweak, since the doc is poor, but if you understand the basics it's easy. Once it's set up, it requires no knowledge to use for installation and rather little knowledge to add packages etc. > May need to be reinstalled occassionally due to high tech network > engineers hosing > various applications (these are going to be workstations, not servers... > accessed frequently by different users... stuff will get broken) Either don't give them root on their boxes - they and install on their homedirectories - or make sure they ONLY install stuff on /usr/local or something. Or reinstall every week, our reinstallation takes some 7 minutes (via NFS on a fast LAN) and requires one floppy (the green one). But those hints on kickstart are rather RedHat-specific. I wouldn't recommend someone porting kickstart to Debian. It sucks, some fighting makes it suck less, but it's still ugly. But Debian really needs something similar. For me Debian is my choice when it comes to my desktop PC or a single server, but when installing more than one server that should be identical, I need a kickstart tool and since Debian doesn't have it and RedHat does...well. Requirements: - simple and liberal configfile (i.e. no strict, or at least non-logical, requirements about the order in the config file) - installation methods: ftp, http, NFS (or doesn't Debian support that at all?), CD - network config: dhcp, static - no interactivity required, all info must/can be given in the configfile If someone are interested in making such a thing or if someone are actually working on it now, I'd be happy to know and maybe contribute (I don't program, but I think I may have some skills on other areas anyway :)) -- Magni Onsøien Initio IT-løsninger AS [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.initio.no/ Tlf. 73 83 71 71/928 10 269
