Ask Slashdot: How Do You Install Ubuntu On 30 Laptops and Keep Them In Sync?

New submitter spadadot writes "I am setting up a new event in France (Open du Web), where between 15 and 30 laptops running Ubuntu Linux will be available. They came with Windows preinstalled and it must stay for other purposes. I'd like to take care of only one of them (resize the hard drive, install Ubuntu, add additional software and apply custom settings) and effortlessly replicate everything to the others including hard drive resizing (unattended installation). After replicating, what should I do if I need to install new software or change some settings without manually repeating the same task on each one of them? Should I look into FAI, iPXE, Clonezilla, OCS Inventory NG? Other configuration management software? I would also like to reset the laptops to the original environment after the event."

Comments

Puppet

[BHearsum]

http://puppetlabs.com/

Re:Puppet

[realityimpaired]

Puppet would be the perfect tool for the job, but there may be a reason he can't use Puppet.

If that's the case, set up your own repo. Mirror Ubuntu's repo, and configure all of the systems to only connect to your repo. Set them to automatically update nightly, and bob's your uncle. If you want to push something to the computers, then push it to your repo and they will update during the overnight push

Re:Puppet

[nahdude812]

Here is the link to Ubuntu's custom install CD article: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallCDCustomization. Create your own custom installer, and use that to image all the laptops.

Configuration management + install server

[halfnerd]

Puppet combined with either Foreman or Cobbler

Live CD/DVD?

[Keruo]

Place the stuff you need on a livecd and give usb sticks to the users if they need storage, remove the hdds entirely during the event, then place hdd back afterwards to reset situation?
Samba/nfs share for storage could work also.

Other solution would be to use G4L to ghost all the laptop hard drives, first to backup them, then to image it with your preinstalled linux stuff.
Then repeat after event to restore original system image, but that would take ~10 days to do, both ways, and you'd need ~5-10Tb space to hold copies of the laptop images.(depending on the size of the original hdds)

There are better sites for this question

[Call Me Black Cloud]

One of the Stack Exchange sites would give you better answers, or at least a set of answers without "frist psot". Take a look at http://serverfault.com/ or even http://askubuntu.com/.

Ubuntu Software center sync option

[pllewis]

I've not used it, but Ubuntu 11.10 software center now has a sync option to sync software between computers. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#Comparing_and_syncing_installed_software_between_computers

Are they going to be fixed in place?

[Junta]

If so, you may want to consider yanking the drives and iSCSI booting them. I know at least with Fedora and RHEL/CentOS you can do this, I presume Ubuntu can as well. Set root-path in dhcp in accordance with rfc4173 and boot iPXE. From there take any PXE-capable deployment mechanism and you can proceed without removing or resizing the partitions.

If only 30 and you lack the experience in this area, you may elect to hand tweak an autoinstall situation. I'm not sure if you need to be particularly picky about 'cloning'. In MS it's almost mandatory as so much of the value of an install is in third-party applications. In the ubuntu case all the packages you want are likely already in the distro and debian-installer is really all you need.

All this said, Live usb key is probably the easiest thing. Stock Ubuntu probably suffices...

Re:There is an open source solution

[Smallpond]

It's called take a fucking CS course at your community college or ask on the Ubuntu forums full of dimbulbs who think "ls -a" is a lifehack.

Why would you take a CS course for an Admin problem? I think you don't know the first thing about computers.

Simplest solution

[RedLeg]

Remove the HDs

Boot from a CD (live CD distro), allow user-owned USB drives for persistent storage.

Optionally, customize the live CD to your needs, installing and removing packages to suit the task.

Red

How to

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1: Ignore StackOverflow, Ubuntu forums, or other sites that will give more accurate info. Instead ask on a site with people of questionable talent and experience with what you're using.
Step 2: Implement poorly researched solution and fck up the entire project

RE: Laptop Management

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently was in the same bind, with a bunch of desktops instead. I was given the task of backup and restoration of 50 desktops in a Computer Science student lab at the uni I work for. I decided to go the route of a Clonezilla server for backup and restoration. All the machines are Dell Optiplex 755's stock, with Windows 7 and Linux Mint Debian Edition dual boot. They all have 120 gb harddrives. I used an unused 1u server and bought 4 2tb Seagate harddrives off Newegg. The lab is wired with cat 6 and is a gigabit network. On average with the server setup it takes about 10 minutes to image all the machines and about 5 or so to restore them all. The server can do this by taking advantage of multicasting. It's easy to setup and the best thing is it only images the used parts of the harddrives. This means in my case each machine's image with both OS is only around 15-20 gigs. Hope this helps.

Why not VMs?

[dugjohnson]

I run VMs (different versions of Linux and Windows) on top of a Windows host all the time. Ubuntu won't have much of a performance hit. You can run them using VMPlayer (I did that for months until I finally upgraded to VMWorkstation) and installing is a two step...install VMPlayer, then copy the VM. Just an idea.