Re: mass-installing Debian
Jens Ritter <jens@hilbert.weh.rwth-aachen.de> writes:
> Dean Carpenter <Dean.Carpenter@transamerica.com> writes:
>
> > I've been thinking a bit about the need for mass-installations. Having
> > done a few of them, it gets to be a tad tedious ...
> >
> > Currently, the preinst and postinst scripts ask the user questions, and
> > make changes according to the responses. Instead of that, we need a
> > general service script that processes a package-specific file containing
> > questions and answer-variables. The results of this get appended to
> > an installation response file that each package can source to retrieve
> > the answers it needs. Hrmm, got that ?
>
> This solves only one problem: Questions asked during the installation.
>
> It does not solve the problems you encounter when setting up e.g. a
> beowulf type system.
>
> What do you do with an NFS mounted /usr partition?
> How do you traverse setup information to all nodes?
> How do you handle different setups for different nodes?
>
> a clueless,
>
> Jens
You generate a special boot disk after installing one system, that
clones the config to all systems. Setupts that are specific for hosts,
e.g. hostname, will be asked on each system, cause they are marked as
such. Or you overload dpgkquestion (from dpkgconfig from my proposal)
to ask one server to tell you the answeres for you host, which in turn
is selected by dhcp or similar.
I wan't to be able to create a bootdisk with the complete config of a
system on it as well as information what questions should be handled
differently from what the package tells, e.g. you might want to
configure some stuff differently on every system, but the package says
the config should be the same for all archittectures.
May the Source be with you.
Goswin
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