Doing a Linux MASS install.

[William Park]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 03:14:30PM -0400, Colin McGregor wrote:
> > What's the physical size of those machines?
> 
> They are low profile desktop boxes, the official
> specs. say the following:
> 
> Low-profile chassis:  
> Weight 10.89 kg (24 lb) 
> Height 10.9 cm (4.3 inches) 
> Width 40.89 cm (16.1 inches) 
> Depth 43.69 cm (17.2 inches) 

I'll help out, subject to scheduling.

> 
> > There are DOS-based ghosting solution, but I'm not
> > comfortable blindly
> > copying sector for sector.  What I usually do is
> > "tar stream", ie.
> >     tar -cf - > /dev/tcp/11.22.33.44/5566
> >     nc -l -p 5566 | tar -xf -
> 
> We can NOT count on the drives all being the same
> size, Dell would have installed what ever hard drive
> they could get for the lowest price that day. Further
> during the time those machines were in government
> service no doubt some of the drives were replaced.
> Other issues, some of the machines have a sound card
> in the expansion bus, some of the machines have sound
> on the motherboard... So we are looking at a lot of
> very similar, but not identical machines...

In that case, set up rows of computers, and go through them like
assembly line, CD by CD.  That way, no need for 100 port hub, ethernet
cables, etc.  But, really, full install of Redhat-9 is about 5GB,
full install of Slackware-10.2 is 3GB, and Ubuntu is even smaller.

-- 
William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>, Toronto, Canada
ThinFlash: Linux thin-client on USB key (flash) drive
	   http://home.eol.ca/~parkw/thinflash.html
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	  http://freshmeat.net/projects/bashdiff/
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