Ask Slashdot: How Do You Install Ubuntu On 30 Laptops and Keep Them In Sync? 202
New submitter spadadot writes "I am setting up a new event in France (Open du Web), where between 15 and 30 laptops running Ubuntu Linux will be available. They came with Windows preinstalled and it must stay for other purposes. I'd like to take care of only one of them (resize the hard drive, install Ubuntu, add additional software and apply custom settings) and effortlessly replicate everything to the others including hard drive resizing (unattended installation). After replicating, what should I do if I need to install new software or change some settings without manually repeating the same task on each one of them? Should I look into FAI, iPXE, Clonezilla, OCS Inventory NG? Other configuration management software? I would also like to reset the laptops to the original environment after the event."
Re:There is an open source solution (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called take a fucking CS course at your community college or ask on the Ubuntu forums full of dimbulbs who think "ls -a" is a lifehack.
Why would you take a CS course for an Admin problem? I think you don't know the first thing about computers.
Ask Canonical (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Partimage and just SSH (Score:4, Insightful)
If you only have 30 machines for one event, puppet/cfengine is overboard. Just set up a passwordless SSH key for root (remember NOT to put the private key on the laptops), and just use a simple script to send the same commands to every laptop.
You forgot error recovery and logging. So PC #25 was rebooting while your script ran... does that make the script fail, perhaps silently? Does that mean all the PCs except #25 are OK, or #25-(end of list) fail? How do you know to rerun the script later? How many times do you have to run it by hand to "make sure" it ran on all machines? You can add logging and some sort of retry mechanism... Just remember that those who try not to use puppet, end up rewriting puppet, just takes a long time and painful bugs. apt-get install puppetmaster on the main and apt-get install puppet on the remotes is just too easy to bother writing a clone of puppet out of shell scripts.
Puppet is much like AFS or LDAP or well, practically any service, the first time you set it up you're all "WTF?" and the second time its no big deal. Google for some tutorials, screencasts... Doing a really halfway job writing it yourself is terrifyingly harder than just using puppet.
Re:Puppet (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the argument of a stuck-up admin who runs a handful of machines.
Stick a zero or two on the number of machines you manage and see how your tune changes.
Re:Puppet (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure about the security aspect so much, but on the performance side, if everything is running over a local LAN, then that shouldn't be a problem with only 30 machines.
You are stupid.
I would imagine there are solutions that can address most security concerns as well.
Scratch that, you are a dangerous idiot. Kill all your friends, then yourself.
The only solution to a security problem of having Windows full access to everything that is supposed to run Linux, is not running Linux under control of Windows in the first place. And killing everyone who proposes something that stupid.