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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: 1) by cbiltcliffe on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:40AM
Your suggestion of Clonezilla is a good one.
There are mentions of testing RAM and hard drives, which is also a good idea; but you don't need SeaTools, etc to do it.
Clonezilla includes Memtest, and you can get to a command prompt, too.
Burn a dozen or so copies of Clonezilla, and set up a decent machine as a server.
Boot each laptop, test with Memtest. When it's finished, reboot into Clonezilla, get to the command prompt, and do a "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=4096" That'll do the equivalent of a full read scan on the HD. If it errors out (make sure you don't use dd_rescue; just dd) then the drive is failing.
Do a full install with updates on a single laptop. Configure everything you need, including user accounts, desktop options, etc. I'd recommend running sshd, too, and configuring it for remote management.
Finally, use Clonezilla to image this to the server.
Now, you can boot a dozen laptops and start applying this image to them.
Write a script that sets the hostname to something that is either randomly generated, based on the MAC address, or whatever unique thing you want to name it to. You can either set this to run on the first bootup, or use it remotely from your server through ssh.
Unless you're installing a lot of software and your image is pretty big, you probably won't be able to do more than a dozen or so at once, as they'll be finished one step before you've got the rest of them going on it, so a 16 port switch to run this on should be enough.