[clug] CLUGers interested in creating a "Government LINUX"

[David Collett]

On Thu, 2005-05-05 at 10:03 +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 06:27:11PM +1000, David Collett wrote:
> > 
> > The paper will be published in the next few days to www.onsecure.gov.au,
> > an online portal for IT security matters in government which is operated
> > by DSD.
> 
> Egad. It's running PostNuke? I look forward to the paper though. Does it
> cover a semi to fully automated install? I've got to come up with a
> dual-boot SOE where I'm working, and I was thinking of using Ubuntu because
> it apparently groks KickStart now.

Dont know about kickstart, I've been 'pre-seeding' the
"debian-installer". Basically you create a file with the answers to any
questions that the installer asks and pass it's URL as a kernel
parameter to the installer. In my case, this means putting the parameter
in the pxelinux config file on the PXE boot server. The result is a
fully automated network Ubuntu install. The details will be in the paper
which I will hopefully have up tomorrow.

It is still a work in progress, I think I'd prefer a network imaging
solution than a network install system. It would be a little easier to
roll-out custom configurations that way. On the other hand, it would not
allow the installer to perform as much hardware detection and so on. I'm
still exploring deployment options, suggestions are welcome.

See Michael Cohen's comments re postnuke, it's not so bad if you take
the right precautions.

Dave