[clug] OS deployment server

[jm]

Depends how repeatable you need this to be and what level of labour 
intensivity you are willing  to tolerate. As others have suggested tar 
(or dd if the servers are identical), puppet for full on going config 
management at scale. You've already found spacewalk.  Assuming this 
means your using redhat or centos you could also just use a kickstart 
script with out the spacewalk server and do any updates via yum 
manually. Either of these will involve a bit of mucking about to get 
going. Are you able to give any more info about the trade offs involved.


Jeff.

On 14/12/11 1:48 PM, 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.
>
> Once upon a time I would have used Norton/Symantec Ghost for this. It
> would take an image of the working machine, then other machines could
> be booted from removable media and have the image copied to them
> across a network connection from the Ghost server.
>
> Can anyone suggest a Linux or FOSS equivalent to that sort of Ghost
> functionality?
>
> So far my web searching seems to suggest that Spacewalk
> [http://spacewalk.redhat.com/] *might* do what I want. Ideally it
> would be great to hear from someone who has used something like this
> recently.
>
> Ideas?
>