A Retrospective on Twelve Years of LISA Proceedings
LISA '99 Proceedings of the 13th USENIX conference on System administration
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The paper describes how to allow a customized automated installation of Linux. This is possible via CDRom, network or tape, using a special boot disk that describes the system that should be set up and either standard SuSE Linux CDs, customized install CDs, an appropriately configured installation server, or a tape backup of an existing machine.A control file on the boot disk and additional (optional) control files on the install medium specify which settings should be used and which packages should be installed. This includes settings like language, key table, network setup, hard disk partitioning, packages to install, etc.After giving a quick overview of the syntax and capabilities of this installation method, considerations about how to plan the automated installation at larger sites are presented. This includes questions like the minimum default installation, criteria how to define classes of machines with identical additional setup and security concerns.Finally, an extension of this methodology that allows system backups and automated restore of such system backups (somewhat similar to the mksysb-feature present in IBM's AIX) is presented.