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Phoenix666 writes:
My daughter attends a small public school in Brooklyn that has asked me to help them figure out the best way to get working computers into the hands of more of their students. They are too small to have their own sysadmin or to be allocated budget to simply buy all new laptops for everyone, and they're so small that they fall far down on the Department of Education's list of priorities.
They do have 50 old Dell laptops running XP that are so full of cruft now as to barely work, so I have suggested loading them up with Ubuntu and a light-weight desktop like XFCE. Installing 50 laptops one-by-one, though, is still a lot of work so I have been exploring doing a mass installation with PXE or Clonezilla.
I haven't attempted anything like this before, so I thought perhaps there are Soylentils who have and could give me a heads-up about potential gotchas they have come across in the past, and which aren't so easy to find via Googling. Ideally I'd like to be able to set aside a Saturday to go in, queue up the machines in the library, and get them chunking through the installation in parallel. Thanks, folks!
(Score: 5, Informative) by pendorbound on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:53PM
Given that this is a school environment, I have a feeling that on-going control of the systems (IE for patching, installing new software, etc.) may be desirable in addition to simply imaging them and throwing them into the wild.
I've recently run an install at work for 25 Linux desktops using Foreman and Puppet. Foreman provides a DHCP/DNS/PXE boot environment that all of the machines connect to for their initial boot up as well as a Puppet ENC for on-going maintenance. It uses various Linux distro's network scripted install process to run an initial installation, then relies on Puppet for continued monitoring and configuration of the systems. Foreman supports Redhat & derivatives, Debian/Ubuntu, and SuSE as the host operating system. It provides install script templates for those distro's various net install processes which include installing & configuring Puppet as the final step. After that, the machines boot normally (locally, not PXE), and check-in hourly to the puppet master to retrieve updated configurations, report any unauthorized deviations in configuration, etc.
We've had the configuration in service for about three months now, and it's worked out great for us. As new software packages are required, we push them out via Puppet. Several occasions where we've found configuration issues that might have necessitated visiting a bunch of PC's manually or providing instructions to everyone on how to fix their own machines have been quickly remedied with a Puppet manifest change and all's well in 30 minutes or less.
Info about Foreman is here: http://theforeman.org/ [theforeman.org]
For what it's worth, we ended up *not* using the DNS or DHCP capabilities since we already had those in our infrastructure which weren't vendors Foreman can control directly (nor would organizational boundaries have lent to that happening anyways). Instead, our DHCP admins manually setup PXE boot entries for the MAC addresses of our machines (two entries for 25 machines, took them a few minutes), and we were ready to go from there.
Total install per machine ended up being a bit under an hour (we push a LOT of development software like Eclipse, Oracle, etc. as part of the process), and we ended up running them in batches of 10 at a time, mostly because that's how many KVM ports we had available. The server wasn't taxed in the least at that level, and I suspect we could have run all 25 at once without any trouble.
To be clear, Foreman/Puppet only get you part way in terms of configuring your systems robustly enough for a bunch of people to start using them. We had to write Puppet manifests to push antivirus software and configure it to use a virus def local mirror, to enable Ubuntu's automatic updates process, and report back on machines that have pending updates not yet applied. The benefit is that we figure out how to do that kind of stuff once, write the Puppet manifest to apply it, and sit back while 25 minutes get the config applied automatically.