You could setup Cobbler and koan install the other machines from the Cobbler server.
Cobbler uses a nice templating engine (Cheetah) and I've managed to use that within the kickstart file Cobbler serves up to specify packages to install for a given machine. So for example on Machine A, I can have the foo package installed and on Machine B install the bar package...
Cobbler even supports PXE booting clients to get installs started...
On Tue, 29 Nov 2011, Thomas Burns wrote:
I've been thinking about ways to proceed if I need to set up 5 machines with basically identical software but somewhat variable hardware. A simple approach would be to just set up my golden system and clone the disk, but the hardware differences would probably cause problems.
One approach that appeals to me is to install minimal centos on the first system, add a few rpms after installation, do my desired config file tweaks, then somehow generate an rpm that depends on all the post-install rpms and contains my custom versions of the config files I tweaked. Then, to set up the other 4 systems, I'd use the kickstart file from the first, then yum localinstall my custom rpm, which would install all the dependencies and tweak all the config files. I assume the centos install would deal with the hardware differences. Does this idea make sense? What happens when two different rpms want to provide the same config file?
Are there any other simple alternatives I have overlooked? What is the best practice when setting up identical software on multiple systems with heterogeneous hardware?
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