Thank you for all the input. Certainly more than one way to do it, as usual... For the single case a simple scp/rsync + grub install seems adequate. However partimage looks like something worth getting familiar with --- so I'll try that.
Sarunas
For your needs, systemimager may be a better choice. I have used it in a lab environment to install similar machines. You would need an image server (just a machine with enough space to store your images). systemimager has some really nice features.
The image of your system is stored on image server in a directory under /var/lib/systemimage (default). This is really nice because you can chroot into the image which is not running to, for example, update packages, etc.
If you install a tftp server, you can set your machines to boot off the network and the tftp server will push the image out. I believe you can even configure to push a particular image from a selection of several based on IP or MAC address.
The best feature, in my opinion, is that it can handle installing the image to machines with different hardware. E.g., you have an image which occupies only 5 GB. systemimager will install it to pretty much machine with sufficient hard drive space as long as things like the CPU arch and hardrive (IDE vs SCSI) are the same.
You can also set it to exclude/include various parts of the image. For example, you image contains /usr/local/pkg1/ and /usr/local/pkg2 but you don't both installed on a particular machine. You can have it ignore /usr/local/pkg1 (or pkg2) as it pushes the image. This can be done for any part of the directory tree.
-Roberto
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