[TriLUG] system imager

[John Turner]

So I was using kickstart for my RedHat builds and we are now moving to 
Suse. I wasn't able to find any simple information on the autoyast 
stuff. And to be honest even kickstart left much more work to be done 
after the initial install. So I went in search of something like the 
Solaris Jumpstart with flash archives method.

It seems disk imaging is mostly used for clustering (might be using an 
IBM Blade Center soon). But I found System Imager 
(www.systemimager.org) to be useful even if you don't have clusters. We 
seem to buy/build machines of similar hardware (IBM xSeries) and have 
in the past installed the same set of software for the most part. So 
the process of building one or two images and just coping it to the 
drives seems to be a time saver.

I just started with SI so I need to work on installing the image on a 
machine with different hardware/partitions, but it can be done.

So if you find yourself doing lots of installs of the same stuff you 
might want to give it a try.

John