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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 dotdotdot on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:07PM
I setup a FOG server [fogproject.org] to do something like this last year. It's pretty straight forward. Here [spiceworks.com] is a basic tutorial.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgoob on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:45PM
I would second FOG. It works wonderfully for what you are looking to do. You could also combine that with the memtest recommendation above. Have a memtest boot off of PXE using fog and then do the installation.
You could set this up where if a machine needed re-imaged all the teachers or others would need is a password.
(Score: 1) by NeoNormal on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:31PM
I would "third" FOG. We use it in our organization to great success.
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Thursday March 27 2014, @06:01AM
+1 for FOG. You build the image you want on one computer, PXE boot it into fog, and upload the image. Then you PXE boot the other computers and pull it down. You can track everything through the web interface, and it lets you set up different groups - in your case it might be for different hardware configurations or for different computer labs.
It also lets you batch deploy new images to existing hosts. You could skip running individual updates on each machine, run them once on your master, and then push it out to everybody overnight.
The most labour-intensive part is adding each host to the FOG server, after that it's a breeze.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:18PM
Thanks, guys, this sounds quite workable for the situation.
Washington DC delenda est.