Tools for Doing Mass Deployments of Linux
Lennart Sorensen
lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Wed Sep 10 17:16:21 UTC 2008
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
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists
More information about the Legacy
mailing list