Doing a Linux MASS install.

[Peter]

You can do a 'tree' install where everything starts from a single 
machine and then 10 machines etherboot from it, then 10 from each of 
these, etc. This requires that the machines be on the same net (you 
can't do that anyway, there will have to be switches or routers 
somewhere). The easiest way to achieve this is to make an etherbootable 
image of, say, knoppix, and use a strict set of leases for dhcp (say 10 
ip's per server). That limits the clients per server. Once a client is 
installed, it becomes a server itself, willing to serve 10 children. A 
script will get the ip of itself and generate a dhcpd config that 
allocates the next 10 IPs in its 'branch'. Note that I have not tried 
this ... but I have experience with 'restrained' dhcp to control load on 
a starting (small) network.

The IPs go like:

mother: 10.0.0.1, serves 10.0.0.10-19

child: 10.0.0.10, becomes 'mother' and serves 10.0.0.20-29
child: 10.0.0.11, becomes 'mother' and serves 10.0.0.30-39
...

the rule is: server ip x.x.x.N -> will dhcp for 10*((N-10)+1)+0..+9

this covers it to 1+10+100 = 111 hosts, and you can't have more than 
this on a network at the same time anyway so it should be enough.

To save time, the next bunch of 100 machines replace the 'last' layer. 
In the end the final install (second reboot) should revert to DHCP 
client mode.

Peter

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml