The first week in March I will be running the computers at a workshop with 25+ PC's all running Linux. All machines will be configured absolutely identical (except, of course, for a few files in /etc, /var, etc.). I will install Debian on one machine and get it setup exactly the way I want. I then need to clone this machine to the other 25 or so computers. I am soliciting opinions on the best way to do this, any advice?
Last year when I ran the same workshop I used the Slackware distribution, and installed slackware on each machine to the point where I NFS mounted the Slackware package files. At that time I broke out of the normal install and untared a copy of the clone system from the NFS mount. This worked pretty well because of the way Slackware is installed---boot with two disks, and it is then network ready. Debian however, seems to not be network ready until the tar image is copied off the four base disks. Is there any way to avoid this? Ideally, I would like to trick the Debian install to untar a clone of the complete install from an NFS server, instead of the standard base system from the floppy set. If this is not possible, I guess the next best thing is to go through the base install and then untar the clone instead of running dselect after the first reboot. I really want to avoid any hardware based solutions (put two disks in a machine and tar/untar from one to the other), because I would have to do it all myself. Any solution I can break down into a simple script and and give it to some PFY's with the instructions, ``do this on them there computer,'' is acceptable. Do you folks foresee any other problems I should be concerned about? Thanks, Jeff Lessem. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
