On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Chris Howells wrote:
Although the design document is incomplete beyond the specification, the code has passed proof of concept stage and is nearing alpha release. You might find this tool helpful; it's a lot easier to take a 'standard' distro and reconfigure it than it is to repackage everything with your desired configuration. :-) Right, this sounds very good :) Have you thought about perhaps taking a standard distro and adding this stuff to this, burning a CD and distributing it? This is pretty much what I want to do.
Historically we have always used network installs but there is no reason why it couldn't be burnt onto a CD.
You also can do network installs without needing to have CD drives in the machines. Also a full distribution of something like SuSE won't fit on a CD, but it will fit nicely on a cheap HDD.
You say that you can install a workstation by only presssing a few keys. Does this work on all distros (or even FreeBSD?)? If so, how?
The broad approach is start by doing a bare-minimum install that is fully automated. Under Mandrake, this is achieved by playing around a little with the standard boot disk and creating a small auto-install config file that lists things like the packages to be installed, the default root password (MD5 hashed, of course!) and specifies that all network settings should come from DHCP. We can boot from a floppy, press "F", "Enter" and after 2-5 minutes the system has done the minimal install, rebooted[1] and is up and running on the network.
At this point, our configuration tool comes in: the workstation (or server) will locate a source of configuration rules and proceed to install any necessary additional software and set up any required configuration. Assuming that all workstations in a school are identical, this means that you just define the workstation configuration as the default. Servers may have particular roles, so you would often need to specify their identity. This is done by typing "fen id=
" instead of just "f" at the boot floppy screen.
If you wanted to be really flash you could probably do this by DHCP options :)
[1] One neat trick we came up with is that you don't need to remove the floppy before rebooting - magic! (Yes, I *am* lazy enough to find the need to remove floppy disks at specified times irritating!)
Pity the PC industry settled on manually ejecting floppies, most other removable media has the ability to eject under software control. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763