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

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

Yes, dd is actually pretty slow in wall clock time.  Where it wins is in 
human time since you just type a short command line and go away, and it 
duplicates any setup work you've done in addition too installing the 
packages.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com