Dear SuSE enthusiasts, Is anyone interested in using Cloneboot? Cloneboot is a simple set of scripts I wrote that allow a machine to partition, format, and load its local hard disk to mirror a "model machine". All this happens during the initrd phase of booting, before the local hard disk has been read. So netbooting with an un-partitioned hard disk, by the time the real local root partition is mounted all the filesystems and files necessary to complete the boot and run are in position. Cloneboot extends the "linuxrc" script to NFS mount the model machine. and then runs a series of scripts on the model machine to do the work. I use it to propagate compute nodes in my Beowulf cluster. Note that all my nodes have identical hardware, so simply duplicating the hard disk and changing the hostname is all I need to do to install another node. The beauty of a system this simple, is that I can set up my model node using all the tools from vi to YaST and then propagate it without having to make build images of create pseudo RPMs with my configuration options. Cloneboot involves having PXE netbooting infrastructure, with DHCP and atftp serving the required (stock suse) kernel but with an initrd produced by a patched mkinitrd. It also requires a model node prepared to NFS export itself (from /, read only) to the network of potential nodes. Once the booting node has mounted the model, it looks in a directory "/etc/clone/" for the scripts and info to build itself. I'd be very happy to forward this work on to anyone who is interested, michaelj -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166 No matter how much you pay for software, you always get less than you hoped. Unless you pay nothing, then you get more.