A different way of installing Fedora

[John Morris]

On Wed, 2013-09-25 at 20:42 -0500, Kevin Martin wrote:

> Sounds like he is trying to do a Linux equivalent of Ghost...I see no reason for all of the negativity.  If you have enough machines
> that are enough alike to be able to clone drives and install them on other machines and then make some very minor changes to get
> them running, I say go for it.  You could even put a script on the primary drive that you then run on the cloned drives after
> install that asks you questions about hostname/ip/etc. and finishes the configuration for you.  Should be an easy way to provision
> boxes it seems to me.

Yup, I do the cloning thing as well to keep fifty some odd machines
synced with a master.  They currently run CentOS6 but the same tricks
would work with Fedora  There are issues though.  Some of the auto
stupidity must be neutered and little details fixed.

The big one is to
touch /etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules and
75-cd-aliases-generator.rules if you still use optical media.  If
cloning you should be sure to clear out the key material in /etc/ssh to
allow the clones to generate their own keys.  Then do

cp /dev/null /var/cache/cups/remote.cache

Or you might have to wait a bit for printing to settle down.

If you aren't moving the physical drive you have the choice of
filesystem copy or image.  If you do the copy through the filesystem
make sure you aren't booting or mounting anything by uuid or you will
lose.

After that is details, clones shouldn't be updating on their own so I
add steps to neuter the update icon, and so on.

I have it down to a science with a USB stick that boots a very minimal
Debian and by invoking a shell script it partitions a machine, rsyncs in
a current system image and sets it up.  It installs CentOS plus a little
debian 'monitor' partition.  When the master image updates the evening
shutdown cron job fires off the monitor to rsync in the changes.  Found
it easier to update a system image if it isn't running at the time.
Only time I have to touch a workstation is when hardware fails.
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