Dump/restore can work remarkably like Symantek/Norton Ghost in this
situation. Get one machine as flawless as possible, then do a dump onto a
spare hard drive. Burn it to a DVD if you like. Then restore onto your
target machines.
You may have to fiddle with installboot to make the clones bootable. The
clones will all have the same IP address so change those before you
connect them to a network. If they're DHCP you should be all set.
If you stick with the generic kernel the OS is very hardware-independent.
I've actually taken a hard drive out of an AMD machine and it booted right
up in an Intel machine. The biggest problem is if the network cards are
different those have to be configured.
Upgrades are usually messy with old files hanging around, better to do
one clean new install and clone it.
Alan
On Mon, 21 May 2012, Richards, Toby wrote:
While my question involves other BSD's as well as Linux systems, I am
asking this here because OpenBSD's philosophy is the most attractive
to me.
I've got about 50 servers to manage. OpenBSD does have an Upgrade
option, but does it upgrade the installed packages? As far as I can
tell, it does not. I do very much appreciate the technology that has
come from the OpenBSD project, yet it seems to me that most *free*
operating systems do not fully support an upgrade path. I can't [fully]
upgrade from one OpenBSD release to another (unless following STABLE
gets me from one RELEASE to another, but AFAIK it does not). I cannot
seamlessly upgrade from Free/PC-BSD 8.x to 9.x. Instead I must
re-install from scrach. The same goes for CentOS/RHEL 5.x to 6.x, and
for every version of Mint Linux.
The two major commercial operating systems (considered to be evil by
the FOSS community) easily upgrade from one version to the next. That's
important in a real-life production environment. In 2001, I upgraded
200 workstations and 7 servers from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000
without incident. I've had similar experience with all subsiquent
MicroEvil systems. I do hate MicroEvil, but I can make only limited
conclusions regarding the upgrade paths of other operating systems:
1) Your project exists only for the sake of doing the project, and for
the technologies that it produces (such as OpenSSH).
2) Folks are expected to install a version of OpenBSD, but not upgrade
because there's no reason to fix something that isn't broken.
3) OpenBSD is only for organizations who have so few servers or so many
IT folks that re-installing everything from scratch is not inviably
cumbersome.
4) I am oblivious to some upgrade path technique for FOSS operating
systems.
Please enlighten me.
Respectfully Submitted,
R. Toby Richards
Network Administrator
Superior Court of California
In and for the County of San Luis Obispo
(805) 781-4150
