[CentOS] Three Identical systems - short cut to setting up the drives?

[Robert Moskowitz]

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>> I am building three identical systems. Well they will have different
>> host names, and with time the software setups will drift. But at install
>> time they are identical.
> ..snip...
>> I would hope this is faster than 2 more installs.
>
> its not
>
> do the install over the network from a http server, given the same 
> network, it would be many times faster to do the 2nd and 3rd install 
> using the ks.cfg generated from the 1st one ( as Terry Polzin already 
> pointed out ).
>
> It will be many times faster than doing DD images of entire drives. 
> eg. in my case here, i can provision a new machine in 2 min and 43 
> seconds for a base+core minimal centos-5 install. installing over http 
> from a machine on a GiB/sec link and installing to a 2 disk raid-1 
There is much good to say about using kickstart method than learning a 
new approach like Clonezilla. I have not used kickstart since Centos 
4.something, so I have no good notes and will have to dig again. But 
this is pretty much a one-time clone and Clonezilla does not seem to set 
up the partitioning info on the new drive so that would be one more 
thing to learn.

So I take the anaconda-ks.cfg file, add stuff so it will boot off the 
network and use the update repo as well as the base. Then rediscover the 
command to run linux from a kickstart file on a diskette.

Piece of CAKE!

:)