Large scale installations of debian
Hi all!
First of all. Sorry for crossposting to two mailinglist but I think
this would be a big issue for beowulf installs as well.
Here at the Royal Institute of Technology in sweden we are going to support
Linux as one of our official operatingsystem. As a big fan of debian (been
using it for years and love it) I said that we should use debian. However
we pretty soon got into trouble.
What we want to do is this. Grabb a computer. Plug boot on a bootdisk.
Now everything should install with as few questions as possible and
become exactly the way we want it. :) The install should be done though
nfs, ftp or preferably afs.
The installation-program didn't really work in a way to make this easy.
This is something that isn't to hard to fix tought.
Now to the large problem. All debian packages can have install and
uninstall scripts and alot of them do. Alot of the scripts asks
the user questions. I've always liked this for my own computers but
this is NOT practical if you want to install 20+ mashines for example.
The Debian-comunity should be very interested in being able to do large
installations since this is something that will become more usual as
more and more companis and schools will use Linux.
Is there any good way to solve this. I've read about people doing
tee pkg.log | dpkg -i pkg-xxx.deb and than installed the packages by doing
dpkg -i pkg-xxx.deb < pgk.log on all the mashines that should have this
package but I find this combersome.
What is your thoughts about this!?
/Erik
--
Erik Bågfors | http://www.acc.umu.se/~bagfors/
Email: bagfors@pdc.kth.se | Center for Parallel Computers
GSM +46 70 398 54 43 | Supporter of free software
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