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:0, Interesting)
Live CD/DVD? (Score:5, Interesting)
Samba/nfs share for storage could work also.
Other solution would be to use G4L to ghost all the laptop hard drives, first to backup them, then to image it with your preinstalled linux stuff.
Then repeat after event to restore original system image, but that would take ~10 days to do, both ways, and you'd need ~5-10Tb space to hold copies of the laptop images.(depending on the size of the original hdds)
ltsp with fat clients (Score:3, Interesting)
Use ltsp https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP
Supports fat clients (all aplications run at each laptop).
You only need to install ubuntu in one laptop and let all others boot from the first one with ipxe.
All laptops (apart from the first) are left unchanged.
Very good implementation (solving some minor issues that may arise) used at many greek schools:
https://launchpad.net/sch-scripts (all documentation is in greek)
RE: Laptop Management (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently was in the same bind, with a bunch of desktops instead. I was given the task of backup and restoration of 50 desktops in a Computer Science student lab at the uni I work for. I decided to go the route of a Clonezilla server for backup and restoration. All the machines are Dell Optiplex 755's stock, with Windows 7 and Linux Mint Debian Edition dual boot. They all have 120 gb harddrives. I used an unused 1u server and bought 4 2tb Seagate harddrives off Newegg. The lab is wired with cat 6 and is a gigabit network. On average with the server setup it takes about 10 minutes to image all the machines and about 5 or so to restore them all. The server can do this by taking advantage of multicasting. It's easy to setup and the best thing is it only images the used parts of the harddrives. This means in my case each machine's image with both OS is only around 15-20 gigs. Hope this helps.
Re:Puppet (Score:5, Interesting)
Puppet would be the perfect tool for the job, but there may be a reason he can't use Puppet.
If that's the case, set up your own repo. Mirror Ubuntu's repo, and configure all of the systems to only connect to your repo. Set them to automatically update nightly, and bob's your uncle. If you want to push something to the computers, then push it to your repo and they will update during the overnight push