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."
Puppet (Score:5, Informative)
http://puppetlabs.com/ [puppetlabs.com]
Re:Puppet (Score:4, Informative)
http://puppetlabs.com/ [puppetlabs.com]
LOL this is the weekly ask /. where the questioner describes the perfect application for Puppet and then asks what to use.
My only other addition is install and set up torque and dish.
Torque is a decent queuing system. Everybody queue up a job to do "something" as quickly as possible, but strictly one at a time.
The DISH distributed shell lets you run a single command line (which could be a script...) on all machines right now. Simultaneously or whatever.
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Or, take a step back from the specific suggestions the poster is submitting, realize it's a short-lived transient effort, and tell him to be less fancy, yank the drives, put in USB keys and be done with it. If one gets 'corrupted' through use/misuse, exchange keys and move on with their life.
For someone who lives day to day with tools like xCAT it's a natural enough thing to use it even for this circumstance and the suggestion of USB keys sounds downright kludgy and tortuously slow, but for one who has not
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
Re:Puppet (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the link to Ubuntu's custom install CD article: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallCDCustomization [ubuntu.com]. Create your own custom installer, and use that to image all the laptops.
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Thee is no legitimate reason for using Linux in a VM, other than being a loyalist of the OS you run it under. For operating systems other than Windows, VMs are only useful for testing, development and reverse engineering.
Of course, this also means thet there is never a reason for using Linux under Linux in VM, or Linux under VMWare ESX -- there are superior environments such as vserver, openvz and others. Everyone who does this, does it out of ignorance, and deserves a title of VMWare jockey.
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'Well-designed operating systems do not have any "hardware abstraction layer"' No. Its a basic choice OS designers make when creating their operating system.
And the choice that is based entirely on analogy is usually a bad one.
Microsoft believes they should be able to change their kernel willynilly without having binary drivers fail after every update.
Those two are completely unrelated. Keeping a binary compatibility and having the interface tied to a per-hardware-device model are two separate ideas, both of different degrees of awfulness.
Linus is ideologically opposed to that so Linux requires the method you describe. It is not "well designed" its *ideologically driven* so that companies can't release binary blobs easily. Linus believes if you aren't willing to share your source, gtfo. I can respect that, but when someone like you comes along spouting it as a superior *technical* design it's like someone going on about how great and objective Fox News is.
Just because someone can make all kinds of choices without exploding, it does not mean that some of those choices are not idiotic.
"A decade later, Unix-like systems have vastly superior GUI". I'm sorry, but no, maybe on a single monitor compared to *XP*, but I use Win7, gui design is a moving target and Unix still lags behind Microsoft which lags behind Apple.
Now THAT is a subjective opinion. Still wrong because KDE does everything Windows 7 ever could, and Apple has the prettie
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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.
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Except 30 nodes is going to cost several thousand dollars for the licensing. It'd be cheaper to hire the local neighborhood kid to sit there for an afternoon and do them individually. For that you could buy and image a new set of drives. Would 32-gig USB thumb drives be big enough for your install, allowing you to usb boot the machines? Or perhaps create a custom Live-CD, which has the advantage that you simply reboot the machine if the user dorks it up?
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Say what? [puppetlabs.com]
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Either I'm missing something obvious, or it's free for 10-nodes and you start paying quite a bit for anything beyond that.
http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/how-to-buy/ [puppetlabs.com]
Node Packs
10 FREE
25 $1,995
100 $6,995
250 $16,995
500 $29,995
1,000 $55,995
More than 1,000 Contact sales@puppetlabs.com
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I use puppetmaster on more than 10 machines. I guess these prices are for the "enterprise* Version which offers VMWare management, GUI and many more features. All unneeded for me.
Cheers,
-S
PS: try # apt-get install puppetmaster
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Either I'm missing something obvious, or it's free for 10-nodes and you start paying quite a bit for anything beyond that. http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/how-to-buy/ [puppetlabs.com]
Node Packs Puppet Enterprise with Standard Support and Maintenance
10 FREE
25 $1,995
100 $6,995
250 $16,995
500 $29,995
1,000 $55,995
More than 1,000 Contact sales@puppetlabs.com
You DID miss something. You pay those prices if you want SUPPORT for the licenses. If you can support yourself, just use the Open Source version. Sort of like RHEL vs Fedora
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You DID miss something. You pay those prices if you want SUPPORT for the licenses. If you can support yourself, just use the Open Source version. Sort of like RHEL vs Fedora
No. There's plenty functionality [puppetlabs.com] you get in the Enterprise version that you don't get in the open source version, so nothing like RHEL vs CentOS (which I assume is what you meant). If you want those features you'll be paying whether you want support or not.
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You're missing something really, really obvious. The prices you quote are for PuppetLabs support (Enterprise Puppet). Open Source Puppet is free. Tree it: "apt-get install puppetmaster". I've had ~400 servers running from a single Puppetmaster instance (~4800 divergences per. hour).
Having said all of that, I'd recommend Chef over Puppet these days. Again, Open Source Chef will work perfectly well for free, or you can pay Opscode for support.
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If you've got a month to learn puppet and master it, and a test bed of one each of the different designated configurations of the laptops, puppet can be very useful. If the laptops need to be _identical_ in configuration, you want a nightly imaging tool such as is used in public computer labs, not a highly context sensitive configuration management tool. This is especially true if people will be manipulating the configurations locally: the ability to ruin a configuration managed file service or website depl
Use a Knoppix LiveDVD instead (Score:2)
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And a horrible delay when anything is started. And no security updates. And no way to install anything. And no support for proprietary video drivers. And unlikely to have working power management, combined with horrendous boot time.
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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.
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Exactly, I'm so sick of the condescending bullshit posted on sites like slashdot from sysadmins who think that because they do everything manually or with custom scripts they are somehow better. As a sysadmin you're hired by a business to administer the systems efficiently and in a way that someone else could take over without too much trouble if you got hit by a bus or decided to leave.
Systems like puppet can usually cover 90%+ of the configurations in an organisation, leaving you the time to properly focu
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So automating the stuff that can be automated with Puppet and devoting my time to the difficult stuff that really does need my attention somehow shows I can't cope? BTW Puppet *is* a 'vendor-provided toolkit', Puppetlabs is a software vendor selling support and services just like Red Hat and others.
I could do with a laugh this morning so perhaps you can share some more insights from the quasi-Soviet time warp you live in where everything has to be done in as manual and inefficient way as possible to justify
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You forgot to reply as an AC.
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10 seconds with Google would have given this guy a dozen choices! hell a whole minute on the Ubuntu forums would have easily given him a dozen more, and who better than the guys that help folks with that OS?
I disagree. Google is a good place to start, but once you have a dozen choices, how do you find out the good & bad of each one, the secret tricks, and so forth? So it's good to start there but also to research other forums, and then check places like Slashdot for the latest and greatest experience. A lot of advice in old forums is out of date, often by years. Unfortunately Google is as likely to give advice from 2006 as from today. Ask Slashdot is a fertile source of good opinions by people who've
Configuration management + install server (Score:5, Informative)
Puppet [puppetlabs.com] combined with either Foreman [theforeman.org] or Cobbler [fedorahosted.org]
the basics (Score:2)
Take a look at debian-installer and preseed, rather simular to kickstart for anaconda based installers, or sysprep for Windows. You can probably push the images out over the network via FTP or NFS.
Then you will want to look at making a local apt mirror or cache depending on your needs, to manage updates and such.
This is at a minimum. NIS or LDAP might also be required if you intend to grow the network.http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/02/26/1730239/ask-slashdot-how-do-you-install-ubuntu-on-30-laptops-and-k
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)
There are better sites for this question (Score:4, Informative)
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This isn't rocket science and a ton of sysadmins read slashdot (still). There's 2 parts to this: deployment (foreman or cobbler to handle the pxe and kickstart configs) and then configuration management (stuff like puppet, chef or cfenine).
use Clonezilla to make a image (Score:3)
use Clonezilla to make a image and just deploy the image to all systems. To make going back easier make a image of the windows install or pull the hdd and just use different HDD's for the event.
Ubuntu Software center sync option (Score:5, Informative)
Are they going to be fixed in place? (Score:5, Informative)
If so, you may want to consider yanking the drives and iSCSI booting them. I know at least with Fedora and RHEL/CentOS you can do this, I presume Ubuntu can as well. Set root-path in dhcp in accordance with rfc4173 and boot iPXE. From there take any PXE-capable deployment mechanism and you can proceed without removing or resizing the partitions.
If only 30 and you lack the experience in this area, you may elect to hand tweak an autoinstall situation. I'm not sure if you need to be particularly picky about 'cloning'. In MS it's almost mandatory as so much of the value of an install is in third-party applications. In the ubuntu case all the packages you want are likely already in the distro and debian-installer is really all you need.
All this said, Live usb key is probably the easiest thing. Stock Ubuntu probably suffices...
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I'd say a 16GB flash drive is large enough to not only boot but run Ubunta. Simply build a custom installation and install it to the flash drives. Pull the drives from the laptops though you need to record what machine they came from for reinstall and configure them to boot from usb. Problem solved and if someone borks the system, simply swap a good stick and reimage. Keep in mind that you can probably get 50+ 16GB flash drives for pretty cheap. This gives you several spares for those who decide to take it
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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)
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The other option is to just load Ubuntu OS's on a fist full of USB drives (4GB are fine)
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Well, you can PXE boot LTSP over wifi if you have a wireless bridge. It's not exactly reliable though, at least it wasn't when I tried it last year.
Where I work we have 300 remote locations running LTSP on lucid. One server at each location, perhaps as many as a dozen thin clients using PXE boot. We built our own update mechanism, where the LTSP servers rsync a directory tree that contains the updates. Anything new, they run the update. If an update fails for whatever reason they send an email back to hq. I
FAI (Score:4, Informative)
Debian (and thus Ubuntu) comes with a Fully Automated Installer (shortened as FAI). Take a look at synaptic, and at its manual.
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The whole thing seems like a rather silly question for a platform that already has a very mature automated installer.
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'spect you're right, but reading down, yours was the first condescending answer that also offered no help.
In the engineering fields I'm experienced in, I find newbie questions produce alternative answers from other people that I've not come across before...
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It can be quite helpful to mention the obvious when people seem hell bent on ignoring it for no good reason.
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'spect you're right, but reading down, yours was the first condescending answer that also offered no help.
In the engineering fields I'm experienced in, I find newbie questions produce alternative answers from other people that I've not come across before...
In the engineering fields I am experienced in (software and embedded systems), I usually find newbie questions gathering answers from people working in the fields I would rather prefer never being involved (Windows GUI development, marketing, being a high school dropout, etc.)
Simplest solution (Score:5, Informative)
Boot from a CD (live CD distro), allow user-owned USB drives for persistent storage.
Optionally, customize the live CD to your needs, installing and removing packages to suit the task.
Red
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Remove the HDs Boot from a CD (live CD distro), allow user-owned USB drives for persistent storage. Optionally, customize the live CD to your needs, installing and removing packages to suit the task. Red
Honestly, for the situation OP's in (obviously a relative noob to true sysadmin if he has to ask) this is the easiest and best solution. Only issues he might have are dhcp and dns, given we know nothing about his network environment. This and similar posts should be modded up. Ye ole Keep It Simple Stupid Rule applies here for sure! Oh, and be explicit as LiveCD also applies to DVD, i.e., a DVD has more space (dual layer at 8.5 GB) and can hold a larger live image.
CFEngine? (Score:2)
How to (Score:5, Funny)
Step 1: Ignore StackOverflow, Ubuntu forums, or other sites that will give more accurate info. Instead ask on a site with people of questionable talent and experience with what you're using.
Step 2: Implement poorly researched solution and fck up the entire project
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Ask Canonical (Score:2, Insightful)
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They'll say Landscape. http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/ubuntu-advantage/landscape [canonical.com]
$105/year Desktop
$320/year Server
For 'bulk' (more than 5) contact them for "special" pricing.
I wish they didn't do this, I'd love to try it and use it myself, locally hosted.
But I'm NOT paying them for the feature.
They proclaim the wonders of Open Source and Ubuntu - then go and drop in closed-source crap that there is no replacement for. Hack something yourself, or pay them stupid amounts of money to use what cam
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.
more info on your setup (Score:2)
On the sever what is taking up 4 TB2 hdd's? I hope it is in some kind of raid setup.
15-20 gigs seems small for a dual boot OS I take it is basic install lacking lot's of added software on each os.
Are there more then 1 image say with differnt software loads?
How often are the images updated?
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Actually, RAID [wikipedia.org] does quite a bit more than for which you credit it.
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Chef (Score:4, Informative)
simple - chef:
http://www.opscode.com/chef/ [opscode.com]
FOG Project for Imaging (Score:2)
FOG Project [fogproject.org]
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Easy (Score:2)
PXE + Kickstart (Ubuntu Equivalent) + CFengine + mrepo + Handfull of simple scripts = Cloned machines environment.
I have this setup at work and new users pick their Red Hat choice (They are given a short list) and kickstart, some scripts and CFengine takes care of the rest. Need to make a changes to 300+ Linux Desktops? Update CFengine and wait until it's hourly run happens and you're done. Need to force certain packages on? Update CFengine and wait until it's hourly run happens and you're done.
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Half way through that I branch off to rsync to populate the system. Then I SSH in via the IPv6 pre-configure link-local address and custom tweak. Reboot. Done.
Oh, and there are alternatives to PXE, like USB memory sticks.
Why not VMs? (Score:5, Informative)
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Exactly! I may not understand the problem, but if they have working copies of XP, why not set up a VM for VMWare Player, install it on the clients, then copy the VM over.
Seems like a hell of a lot easier than trying to automate changes to hard drive partitions. (Which is an interesting thing to do, though.)
Parallel SSH (Score:2)
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I did that for a bank of 10 machines 12 years ago. They are still asking this question today?
Partimage and just SSH (Score:2)
For cloning, use partimage, clonezilla, or ghost. BUT, if you need to keep the windows partitions (each one is likely licensed differently), only copy the Linux partition and boot sector, not the whole disk.
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.
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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.
The submitter wants max 30 machines, and only for a limited time. Telling him to learn how to use puppet would waste his time. If he just wants to install a piece of forgotten software after the event has started, a quick (bash runonallmachines.sh apt-get install foobar) could print out the info to stdout, and reading through 30 such messages isn't that big of a deal. Sure, if this were a long term project, or if he had more machines, puppet would make sense, but why not stick with something easier to us
Re:Partimage and just SSH (Score:4, Informative)
> Just set up a passwordless SSH key for root
No. If you worked for me and I caught you doing this, I would first write you up for a direct security violation, and if I caught you doing it again I would fire you. Passphrase free keys leave your deployed network vulnerable to anyone who can steal the key from the hacked server, backup, or anyone who manages to walk off with that key by other means. Doing this is as bad, if not worse, than putting a post-it note with the rude password on your desktop monitor.
Setting up an ssh-agent to passphrase wrap such a remote root access key is a basic step. Restricting remote access to the designated management server is another basic step in protecting such a network from root key theft. Throwing such unprotected keys around is unfortunately, a very common practice among systems people who believe that "if they're inside our network, we have much bigger problems". Since these machines are laptops, they will be walking into and out of the network, and it's reasonable to assume that the network will be attacked from a machine inside. Basic security practices, such as system updates, password expiration, and access key handling should all get some attention to protect the network.
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Throwing such unprotected keys around
You did notice I said NOT to have the private keys on the laptops themselves? The submitter wants something easy to use for a limited period of time (an event). Chances are, submitter won't even encrypt the drives, so there's not much preventing a bad apple from throwing their own passwordless ssh public key on the laptop. But once that happens, all they have access to is 30 laptops which can all be reimaged in no time, and they would be at the end of the event. Whoopie.
Doing this is as bad, if not worse, than putting a post-it note with the rude password on your desktop monitor.
Did you mean root password? Anyw
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Doing this is as bad, if not worse, than putting a post-it note with the rude password on your desktop monitor.
Not if you have a reasonably sane method of securing the private keys. I'm not advocating password-less keys, but that comparison is WAY overboard.
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When people need to secure physical objects at work (eg - HR files, keys to storage areas, etc), what do they do with them? That's right - the lock them in offices. This is a completely reasonable method for securing things.
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Virtualise (Score:2)
What if you install a virtual machine once, and then copy it over to the other machines?
Also, if everything else fails (my apologies for saying this but somehow you don't give out a vibe that you are on top of the situation) is it the question for people to be able to use laptops, but not being able to mess around on them? Then I guess your final -and easy- option is to just open accounts for them in the existing OSes, and tell them to act civilized. Is that an option?
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open accounts for them in the existing OSes
Sorry, I just saw that it has to be Ubuntu- how about wubi [ubuntu.com]? It is a windows-based Ubuntu installer, it installs an Ubuntu system without partitioning that stands as a cluster of files in the host windows, it is not virtualised (both systems don't run at the same time) and if you carefully set up the boot loaders on the other machines, you only need to copy over one (huge) file -the "image"- into the other machines. In addition, you will have to remove the option of booting to Windows, and then go in via a b
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Why bother with virtual machines? He can just tar the partitions of one machine, and copy them into the other machines. Then, copy /dev/null and /dev/console, run grub-install /dev/sda (or whatever is it), and you are done.
But still, that is more work than it should take.
Simple is better (Score:2)
if the laptops are all alike (Score:2)
Now yo
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.
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An academic background in CIS can be very handy for dealing with "Admin problems". Having something resembling a clue helps in any field or endeavor.
It helps to be more than just a trained monkey.
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s/trained/cheese eating surrender/
IT admin does not = business admin (Score:2)
a it admin is a tech person not a business person and CS is not IT.
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i did 'apt-get install clue', but my users still won't learn...sigh...
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You must be a software developer.
Having a CS or CIS degree in IT is extremely handy.
CS in IT is handy for not knowing what you are doi (Score:2)
CS in IT is handy for not knowing what you are doing but having a lot therey.
Now CS my help you be a developer but some times it's so high level it does not help.
But for IT tech / admin work? A tech school will help you a lot more.
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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.
Because IT and MIS courses are usually Windows-only.
for a non windows OS? (Score:2)
and that still does cover the imagining part
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I see several people answering this Ask Slashdot have suggested it. But no one, not even the puppetlabs web site, explains either what it is doing, or why it is better than the old ways. It seems to all be oriented to PHBs that might see it before they realize their SA has just been doing it all along without any payware.
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That's one way. I had to do this with a stack of netbooks. I just made a USB memory stick do the same thing. I've also read about people doing this with PXE. Ubuntu has packages to do this either way. No doubt Debian and Fedora could, too.
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How about the initial install that has to resize MS Windows first, then install Linux in the emptied space?
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I'm sure configuring a different IP address for each machine would be important. That or just run your network DHCP'd. I'd at least use IPv6 link local addresses to login with (they actually are more reliable).
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I just booted an in-RAM system via PXE and/or USB memory sticks on each machine, and populated the hard drive via rsync. I didn't even bother with DHCP and used IPv6 link local addresses to get started, and updated each machine's network config with a MAC to IPv4 map (only once, because sometimes I do need to replace NIC cards or motherboards and I don't want a machine's personality to be lost because of that).
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Citrix product, do not use.