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? > > mahalo, > Dave > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > Scot P. Floess RHCT (Certificate Number 605010084735240) Chief Architect FlossWare http://sourceforge.net/projects/flossware http://flossware.sourceforge.net https://github.com/organizations/FlossWare