I guess the ultimate would be setting up your computers as 30 terminal servers without hardrives (www.ltsp.org).
What I do on my network is have each machine setup with enough stuff to get it running and talking to the network and then bring in the /opt, /usr/local and /home stuff via NFS. You don't need /usr/portage for booting so why not import that as well? Its a lot easier than dowloading via ftp. Secondly use NIS for central administration of users and groups. Both of these can be administered quite nicely using webmin. On Friday 21 January 2005 05:36, Phill wrote: >I'm somewhat in charge of 'converting' a 'Windows lab' into a 'Linux >lab' - 30 or so computers averaging pentium 2s with a few pentium 3s >thrown in for good measure. > >I'm thinking of something along the lines of a simple tarball of a few >essentials (i.e. stage3 + kernel + network settings) and then simply >getting the remainder pre-compiled binary packages off an ftp server >somewhere in our network as we want to keep this down to 1 cd. >However, I've never had to do anything like this before - so I'm at a >bit of a loss. > >In short, are there any better ways of doing this (instead oftarballing >the the whole thing and throwing it onto a livecd)? > >Where can I 'trim the fat'? (i.e., /usr/portage and the ilk) > >Also, are there any tools for mass remote administration? SSH is nice >and all, but it would be awesome if one could tell 30 machines to >shutdown -h now simultaneously. > >I'm perfectly content with editing a knoppix iso (gentoo live cd's have >a tendency towards not booting on our Dell Optiplex GX1's ( >http://support.jp.dell.com/docs/systems/ban_gx1/specs.htm ), which are >the bulk of our lab), deleting all of the unecessary stuff and adding >the tarball in some random folder - but it feels so... unelegant. > >Cheers and sorry for the lack of coherence. > > >-- >[email protected] mailing list -- [email protected] mailing list
