The computer science department at my university has many Linux boxes. Say, on the order of 100. Almost all these boxes run RedHat (not Debian, but read on).
I don't like RedHat that much: for example, RedHat 7.0 ships with broken kernel headers, an unreleased and unsupported version of the gcc compiler, and a glibc version on which gcc will only compile after applying patches (these patches complicate life by changing, in an architecture-dependent way, header files which get put in architecture-independent places). I would like to investigate replacing RedHat with Debian. The current rationale for using RedHat is that there exists a mechanism for installing/upgrading many RedHat boxes, in a customized way, over the network. This mechanism is called "kickstart". I don't know much about it. I don't know if a similar mechanism exists for Debian. However, I suspect that it does. My question, then, is this: does anyone have (or know of) a mechanism which will allow us to install Debian remotely on a hundred+ boxes, including department-specific customizations, such as patches and non-Debian files? Given that we are a research environment, administered by some pretty clueful people, our linux installations will necessarily be very customized. So something like 'apt-get', by itself, is not good enough as I know it. Finally, I think I've seen posts about this on this list before, but I'm not having any luck finding them via the archives search engine. So I apologize if it turns out that this topic has already been beaten to death on this list in the past (I've been off the list for a while, owing to its high volume). cheers, chris
