nate wrote:
Most of our machines have 5 or so NICs, each connected to special purpose subnets. And even the ones that only need 1 or 2 connections will have the same physical setup so the servers are reusable.
Trunk all the ports and use VLANs ?
This might be possible now - it wasn't when the infrastructure was built and it still seems like a bad idea to throw 60Mb+ multicast feeds onto the same physical interface with anything else.
Of course, but that's the point. If you've had old Cisco switches that didn't auto negotiate well, you'll have all of the connected equipment set to force full duplex. Then when you replace the switch you have to undo that - probably one subnet at a time. How do you manage real-world things like that with a configuration tool?
Set the new switches to be forced full duplex too and go in and fix the systems with a script or by hand, or just rebuild them (very few of my systems have data on their local drives that is valuable, everything is stored or transferred to centralized storage)
But will the tool do these changes for me?
You wouldn't believe the lengthy list of commands needed to build a system from the ground up before I re-wrote everything so it is automated.
Sure, but after doing one right, clonezilla can give you a thousand just like it without caring how it got that way. I agree it's ugly, but it also doesn't depend those underlying commands being repeatable or the OS that they ran on.