[clug] OS deployment server

[Angus Gratton]

On Wed, 2011-12-14 at 13:48 +1100, Mike Carden wrote:
> I have a handful of new Xeon servers that I want to set up with almost
> identical OS installations. The plan at this stage is to get one of
> them up, running and configured with Debian stable AMD64, then use its
> image to set up each of the others.

Hi Mike,

These answers might be a bit lo-fi and featureless compared to what
you're aiming for, but at various times I've used both tar|nc [1] and
dd|nc [2] to get these kind of results.

dd-ing the whole disk is slower compared to just copying the files via
tar. The advantage is you can be extra lazy, because you don't even have
to worry about dividing up partitions or installing a bootloader on the
"target" disks.

Cheers,

Angus



[1] http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/~djw/tarpipe.html
[2] http://www.rootninja.com/dd-and-netcat-like-peanut-butter-and-jelly/

(I didn't use these two howtos but they seem to have the method well
described in each case.)