Network Distros

[cpjitservices]

How are people rolling out linux on your networks be it Desktops or Servers ?

[featured_spectre]

At home

 

Virtualised Ubuntu server running Dansguardian and squid for my daughter (she knows how to get to CBeebies website - click on her login image, click on the link on the desktop).

 

At work, one place I Was at had an entire suite of linux (cant remember the distro) and ubuntu server 10.04 LTS.

[cpjitservices]

How are you actually rolling it out ? We have a few Windows servers which we want to replace with Fedora/Redhat but dont want to go to each individual server and install it from DVD every time one by one, pretty much like how we deploy windows 7 via WDS is there a way to deploy Linux through WDS or a similar thing ?

[featured_spectre]

Why do you want to replace them if you don't mind my asking.

 

Best thing in my opinion is to set one up and have it running side by side...Transfer ADUC over to open LDAP.

Not so much you can do in terms of GPO's but if I remember rightly on a complete set up there is something similar.

 

Just lots of settings. On my box at home its all basic, just have the DNS on the daughters machine pointing there

[ChrisH]

Look into WDS syslinux etc. The same way you boot things like memtest and DBAN you can boot net ISOs and stuff like that.

[LosOjos]

You could put the installation files on an NFS and perform a network install (instructions here are for Fedora): 7.6.3.*Performing a Network Installation

[cpjitservices]

Well its not so much that we want to replace them really, but we use Centos quite a lot for building different things. We usually wham a DVD in and let it roll but just lately we have come across a couple of old servers which we could put to good use and they only have CD Drives in and not having any spare DVD drives that a SCSI we had to install via the 7 CD option, however if we could roll it out via the network all we'd need to do is plug the server into the switch and boot it and start deploying Linux. That would be an ideal solution. Currently we have 5 Centos Servers, the old servers we are going to use for testing purposes and next year we are getting a load of blade servers for use in our Data Center for web hosting and we would rather be able to deploy Centos to the servers on a similar solution to WDS.

 

If anybody knows a way...

[cpjitservices]

Ahhh I see I never thought of those ideas thanks everyone!

 

Someone in my department mentioned a cobbler server but it looks confusing.

[ChrisH]

If anybody knows a way...

 

My previous post has a possible solution. You don't need to use WDS you can use any pxe server using a boot image and syslinux and whatever kind install you want or use it to start some kind of image install.

[lownoize]

For Clients we use images, and roll them out via pxe. We use drbl/clonezilla for that task. Clonezilla - Sever Edition

If you are not comfortable with images because you need different sets of software on every system or have different hardware have a look at FAI FAI - Fully Automatic Installation