Re: [PLUG] Community Service Project

[Magnus <chrish@trilug.org>]

On Wednesday, July 9, 2003, at 09:10 PM, Jon Nelson wrote:

> This is where PLUG comes in...I was hoping to recruit as many people as
> possible to install Linux on all the boxes.  I'm hoping the majority 
> will
> have the same hardware, which would make this decidedly less difficult.
> As far as time frame, I don't have one.  I'm just trying to gauge the
> level of cooperation I can muster.

If you do it right, it actually won't take more than one or two people.

The trick is to automate the installs.  For Red Hat, I've had some 
success with Kickstart (but not today... I tried doing something new 
and it didn't work as expected...)

I have been in a similar boat where I got a large number of PC's, 
mostly alike (though with some differences) and used kickstart to 
automate the Linux installs (used Ghost for the Windows machines).

You spend most of your time at the front end deciding the proportions 
for disk partitioning, with minimums & maximums, what packages you want 
installed by default, post-install script, etc.  You're also going to 
want a big fat network switch, and borrow an ftp server with a gigabit 
link to the big fat ethernet switch (which will help you handle 
concurrent loads).  Of course, this being a volunteer project you might 
have to live with whatever you can scrape up and just let the installs 
take longer.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
PGP Key fingerprint = 984D 9A88 3D60 016F BE01 1506 60FB 85E1 9ABD 96F6

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