Tools for Doing Mass Deployments of Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 11:59:59AM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> The "Cloning a running Linux OS" thread inspired me to ask about doing 
> mass deployments of Linux.
> 
> I am helping a small school get their systems in order. At the moment, 
> it's all Windows and many of the machines in the lab are infested with 
> all manner of malware. Initially, we started out with the idea that we 
> were just going to do fresh installations of Windows XP only to discover 
> that was not feasible since we don't have appropriate licensing to 
> install XP Pro on all the machines. That would require us to purchase XP 
> Pro licenses, which for a school is not a big deal, if only Microsoft 
> would sell them. Apparently, they now have to buy Vista licenses and 
> there is some question as to whether a "downgrade" would be allowed or 
> not and whether those Vista keys would work for XP Pro. One thing we are 
> certain of is that some unknown number of the machines and some of the 
> software they are currently running will not be supported by Vista so 
> running Vista is not an option. Enter, Linux, though not without some 
> resistance, mostly out of fear of the unknown.
> 
> I have thought about using LTSP but it seems like such a waste to turn 
> Pentium 4 2.4GHz+ and Core2 Duo machines with between 2GB and 4GB of RAM 
> into thin clients. There is experimental support for local apps but I'm 
> mindful of the fact that Linux doesn't just have to be good in this 
> environment. It has to be close to perfect to gain acceptance amongst 
> the passive (and active) resisters so I'm wary of things marked 
> "experimental".
> 
> Ideally, I want the ease of centralized management of LTSP but with fat 
> clients that don't have to netboot and can local apps. For instance, 
> let's say I want to install EduBuntu on each desktop. In advance, I want 
> to select packages, locales and time zone, integrate with a directory, 
> and merge all the updates into the installation source. From the server, 
> I want to wake up all the client machines on the LAN and do a push 
> installation via PXE based on my installation source. Once the 
> installation has finished, I want to shut the clients down. The clients 
> will not store any user data so it should be feasible to repeat the 
> process when we update the "master" installation source by adding, 
> removing, or updating software. I realize that we could automate this 
> using Puppet or some such tool but the fresh, push installation is 
> probably a better route to go for the sake of keeping the desktop 
> machines synchronized and uniform.
> 
> DRBL <http://drbl.sourceforge.net/> supposedly does all this but it has 
> not exactly been the most intuitive thing to configure.
> 
> I looked at kickstart for Ubuntu but it seems broken because I don't see 
> any package selections. KIWI for openSuse looked mildly interesting 
> except I feel like a fish out of water with openSuse, not to mention 
> that I got random freezes on one of the newer Core2 Duo machines with 
> openSuse 11. (Remember, it has to be close to perfect.) I won't even 
> consider Fedora because it changes too quickly. CentOS 5.2 had trouble 
> with the Intel Q965 graphics chipset. Besides, K/Ubuntu is perfectly 
> fine. Debian's FAI, which is also available for Ubuntu, might be an 
> option, though I have no experience with it.
> 
> Any suggestions would be most appreciated, well, maybe except for "run 
> Gentoo/*BSD/OpenSolaris".

Check out FAI.  It is a multi distribution automated install system
originally started at a university to help deploy beowulf clusters and
grew from there.  It even does opensolaris, so it is quite independant
of distribution.

http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/

It even claims to help manage all the machines to some extent centrally
which might be desired in this case.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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