On Tue, 6 Aug 1996, David C Winters wrote:
> I've got approximately 50 machines I need to build. My best option
> for the initial system build, unless I've missed something, would be
> to run deselect on one machine, then take a deselect-generated file
> containing my selections and exporting that file to all the other
> machines, so I can just start up dselect and choose "Install" without
> having to go through "Select" on each.
>
> How can I accomplish this? Which file(s) do I need to export in order
> to make this happen? And, is there a better way to achieve the same
> results?
I need to do something similar. i asked Ian Jackson (dpkg's author) about
it but he seems quite disinterested in the idea.
Anyway, what you need to do is:
(WARNING: The following steps should work, but i haven't tested this
process yet.)
1. mirror the debian archive, and export it with nfs. NFS installation
from an up-to-date mirror is the easiest and quickest way of
installing debian.
2. install the base system on one of the machines as normal:
- by floppy (boot,root, base1, base2, base3)
or
- by creating a new boot floppy with NFS support. Switch to the
2nd virtual console and and mount a directory containing the
base_1.1.tgz file (which can be found under either rex or buzz in
disks-i386/current/).
The debian install disks will install from that file rather
than the 3 base disks if it finds it in either the mount point or
any first level subdirectory (if you mount it as /debian, then it
will look in /debian/base_1.1.tgz or /debian/*/base_1.1.tgz).
It's probably simplest just to NFS mount your mirror
as /debian, and make sure there is a symlink from
{rex,buzz}/disks-i386/current/base_1.1.tgz to /debian/base_1.1.tgz
3. configure the machine.
4. now reboot. dselect will stary up automatically. select & install all
required packages.
5. take a copy of the file /var/lib/dpkg/status.
cp /var/lib/dpkg/status /tmp
6. now this is where it gets tricky.
for every package listed in the status file, there will be a "Status:"
line. You need to change every line which contains "Status: install
....." so that it reads "Status: install ok not-installed".
the following sed script is a good starting point for doing this
automatically.
sed -e 's/^Status: install..*/Status: install ok not-installed/'
</tmp/stats >/tmp/status.new
7. now try installing another machine using this file.
8. install the base system as in step 2 above. configure it as in step 3.
9. quit out of dselect.
10. copy the status.new file you created in step 6 to /var/lib/dpkg/status
on the new machine. It might be convenient to use the top directory
of your mirror as a temporary transfer drive. just NFS mount the
mirror as /debian and "cp /debian/status.new /var/lib/dpkg/status".
keep a copy somewhere else, though. remember that mirror will
delete this file next time it runs because it doesn't exist on the
remote archive site. or configure mirror to not delete "status.new".
11. run dselect. tell it where to find the packages with 0. [A]ccess. Then
1. [U]pdate packages information.
12. now run 3. [I]nstall. It should install all the files which were
selected on the other machine.
note, it's possible to do something like this with a debian cdrom rather
than NFS. the base_1.1.tgz file was created to make cd-rom installations
as well as NFS installations easier.
Reminds me, i should send some email to the archive maintainer (Guy
Maor, I think) asking him to include a symlink to base_1.1.tgz in rex/
or buzz/ so that the install disks can find it. And also some email to
Bruce Perens asking him to compile NFS into the kernel of the boot disk
- there's been some problems with symbol version mismatches for the NFS
module on the last few boot disks.
Craig
