On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 01:42:53AM +1000, James Buchanan wrote:
> > * making the whole process (more?) scriptable, e.g. for mass rollout
> > events (might be very useful in cluster environments)
> 
> Forgive my ignorance, but how would this work?  Is it possible at all to 
> setup on one machine and have all the rest get installed from there, 
> without touching them?
> 
> Maybe they just contact a machine on the LAN and suck down the install 
> image and get on with it, unattended, according to a file listing the 
> packages to install, how to lay out the disk partitions, etc?  Of 

E.g. use DHCP to get the install script, i.e. the info that a user
normally gives to sysinst itself. The dhclient client provides its
MAC address to the server and maybe other info like its harddisk size.
A look at pkgtools/pkgchk and pkgchk.conf may be useful?

> course that means putting a setup CD in each machine to run a program 
> to tell it what to do.

Or a smartcard or simple USB-key or floppy to boot the sysinst from
(but it could even be netbooted).

F.