[CentOS] how to install standard software on systems with heterogeneous hardware?

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 6:05 AM, Deyan Stoykov <dstoykov at uni-ruse.bg> wrote:
> 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.
>
> Not in my experience. I usually do a quick install on the target machine
> with a separate /boot partition and then clone everything from the
> source apart from swap and /boot. This way the target machine will have
> proper initrd with the required modules, such as storage drivers, at the
> first boot. Then boot in single mode, reconfig networking,
> modprobe.conf, fstab, hostname, etc., reboot and that's it. This assumes
> all machines are on the same arch and you don't use LVM or software RAID
> - otherwise it's more complicated then that.


I've done that as part of a restore operation when dropping a tar
backup onto somewhat different hardware (which would seem like a
common enough operation that there would be a nicer approach...).   If
you know as much as anaconda does about hardware devices and driver
module names you can build a working initrd manually, but it may be
easier to just install on that or identical hardware and only keep the
/boot contents.  And you'll still probably need to know some things
about device naming to fix up fstab and your network configs.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com