On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 13:02:51 +0100
Dave Smith
On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 01:51:06PM +0200, andersn@isy.liu.se wrote:
Hi.
I have for some time been looking for a remote boot solution for Linux (and Windows). I have a lab with somewhat 50 PC's where I wish to be able to easily do a complete reinstall of the OS of choice from a server holding all files, an image or something like that. There is one solution freely available from www.bpbatch.org which has some nifty features, however development seems to have stopped (latest version from year 2000) and judging by descriptions there seems to be a heck a lot of work to get it up and running. Besides it does not support NTFS, but FAT and EXT2 though.
I would like the solution to be able to handle both SuSE and Windows XP, which will be available on each PC via dual booting.
Anyone got any experience from bpbatch?
Anyone know of another solution?
Are you trying to set the system up so that each machine reinstalls itself whenever it is rebooted, or just be able to install from a network- available source?
Well, initially I want to clone configured installations from one PC to the rest of the other PC's. Then if needed when something brakes, gets tampered with or something like that I would like to be able to reinstall, say from an image stored on a central server. So, yes - installing from a network available source is what I want. I figure it will be necessary rather seldomly though.
SuSE has the ability to load an install configuration from a floppy, so you could use this to configure a network install, but this is probably more work than you're looking for if you want to reinstall every reboot.
I though slightly about this. Is there a tool that can be used to create such a floppy from an existing installation?
Alternatively, if the hardware is identical, you could make the install on one machine, then boot the system with a boot/root disk, dd the whole partition to a file and store this file on the server; you could then configure etherboot and an initrd to download the disk image from the file server and write it directly to the disk. However, you would need to configure the machine to get its hostname, IP, etc. via DHCP. Also, this probably won't work with WinXP, as I think XP has code which checks serial numbers of processors to make sure that you only install once.
The dd approach is what is currently used. It is time consuming and like you say there are always manual configurations to be done afterwards. /Anders