Hi People, I'm currently in the process of preparing to install several Debian boxes which will be used to form a processing farm. I'm therefore looking for ways to ease the installation so that it's not going to need lots of hand tweeking along the way.
The general setup of the machines will be: Athlon Processor, 2-4GB of Memory IDE drive (20-40GB), 3Com 3c905C network card, Video card for instalation only, general running will be with the only access by network. "Woody" Based (needed for the software they'll be running). 2.4 Kernel (for ReiserFS, Large File, and High Memory support) Currently I've set-up a local RSync mirror (updated nightly) of the UK Debian Mirror (our local one), so that installations can occur without going out to the Internet, and therefore should be a lot quicker. I've decided to mirror Woody and Sid (i.e. the two package pool dists), i386 binary only. I'm also planning to do a custom kernel package which will be installed across all the machines. This will be placed on a network drive somewhere so it can be pulled in during the install. Now, the last couple of days I've been playing with the first box to try to streamline the install procedure. My thinking is that if we're going to be installing several boxes identically it would be nice is I can get so that a muppet can install it just by following a set of instructions. I've hit a couple of issues though. 1) I'm booting the machine off the current woody rescue/root images (ReiserFS ones). Everything works great until it tries to install the base distribution. Because my mirror is of Woody and Sid, the installation fails because there are still several packages linked over to Potato. One of these is "at", which is part of the base distribution. My mirror is already 8G and I really don't want to add another 5 to that to mirror Potato as well. Does anybody have any idea how to get around this? 2) Once the base installation is complete (by pointing it to an outside mirror), I want to be able to select a particular set of packes and have them install. I was planning to tweak the package set-up on the first box until I have exactly what I want, and then use "dpkg --get-selections" to save it. The problem is that when I use "dpkg --set-selections < [file]" it appears to add the extra packages I've chosen, but not remove packages I've gotten rid of of the first machine. Does anybody know of a method to get a package selection list from machine A to machine B, so machine B ends up with exactly the same packages installed regardless of what was there before? Also, any other pointers that people may have if you've ever attempted this before. Thanks Paul -- Paul Sargent mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
