Prepackaged configurations

[John Hearns]

On Sat, 2004-05-22 at 19:43, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Something that's missing in the OS is an "out of the box" experience
> for the different ways one might use the operating system.
>  
> In an ideal world, someone could maintain the canonical best practice
> setup for say a locked-down desktop lab, and everyone else just
> clicks/types "install me a locked down desktop lab system," applies any
> site-local tweaks, and that's it.
> 

Do things like LCFG http://www.lcfg.org/ help?
With lcfg you hold system profiles on a central server.

>From the FAQ:
"Configuration parameters ("resources") for all machines on a site are
stored in a number of "LCFG source files" on a central server. The files
describe "aspects" of the site configuration, such as "a web server", or
a "Dell Optiplex". "

"New machines can be installed automatically by creating the appropriate
source files and booting... The required package set is installed
according to the profile, and the components configure the system in
exactly the same way as a fully-installed machine."


Also look at the related Quattor project from CERN.
http://quattor.web.cern.ch/quattor/
This is being developed for the automatic installs of heterogenous
machines on a Grid.
I don't see why the PAN language developed there couldn't be used ofr
these canonical machine types.