Hi Phil [Never done this so can't promise anything] I've used ghost a number of times to perform disk upgrades, and the only time it failed was going from a 3GB to a 10GB, so I would recomend this for the disk cloning. The only thing that I can think of that needs to be unique per machine is the hostname and the IP address. Using DHCP should solve this problem. You can let each PC grab the first available IP when booting, which is the easiest way to do things. The problem here is if you have printers etc. hanging off these PC's then the printer would move when the PC moved. Alternatively, you could man each NIC's MAC address to an IP address so each machine always has the same IP/Hostname. This gives a more stable network but requires more setting up. You could use a mixture of course, and just map MAC's for PC's with printers. You shouldn't have the problem with the NIC's being on different IO Addr/IRQ that you would with a Windows system as the kernel (usually) detects them on bootup. Just don't make the initial build system too specific. Gary. On Tuesday 24 July 2001 10:11 am, Phil Driscoll wrote:
Progress on getting a good system running on the 32Mb machines we've been given is going well. At some point over the summer holidays, we are going to need to install a working system on 123 machines.
The machines all have 'blank' hard drives, a floppy drive and onboard realtek ethernet NIC. I cannot guarantee that all the hard drives are identical, although they are all about 3Gb.
The final setup on the machines will be basically Suse 7.2 with some tweaks - I guess a lightweight kernel and, it currently looks like a hacked version of icewm with all 'toys' removed.
All machines will be identical apart from IP address (fixed) and hostname.
It would be great to have a boot floppy which would bootstrap an installation over the network. Does anyone have any experience in this area? Any advice on suitable technologies gratefully received.
Cheers
-- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000