Mass server / workstation setups, how to transfer installed software packages?

[xlinux1010]

I've been doing some searching on this but haven't found a lot of specific info... what I want to do is to transfer all the installed packages from an ubuntu based linux machine onto other machines, basically they are machines running on different hardware (and some on cloud / hosted environments as well) so I want to keep the base ubuntu system files different on each machine but want to be able to interchange the installed software packages (examples of this would be firefox, openoffice as well as a bunch of specific 3D and scripting / ide packages)

Does anyone have any information as to which directories to copy to the new machines? I assume /bin /usr/bin /home (etc) but am not sure of which others, basically which do I need to keep as original for the hardware, etc to work properly?

Thanks for any advice

[Mad Professor]

Your best bet is pxe deployment.

You got two options...

A: Install ubuntu, and install all the software/packages that you want then make an image of the drive using drbl and then make a PXE/TFTP server and setup the target subnet for automatic install first boot. You can also use clonezilla to achieve this task.

This is great if you have several hundred identical machines.

Downside to this is that you will have to make image for every different hardware in machines. And also all the machines will have the same hostname and domain, there's a way to have the setup script change the hostname and domain if need be after the image has been transfer.



I perfer this option below.
B: You setup a PXE server and setup an unattended install of ubuntu and inject whatever modules you need for all the machines. Then make an install script for all the packages/software you need to install. After that setup a way that your employees can login on, may it be centralized logins like active directory or ldap or automatic logon making the station available to anyone in the office, then adjust the settings script to implement your login choice. After that make any other adjustments, then mass deploy.

This is great when you have a variety of machines and you need to install the same operating system on each of them but need the smart setup for adjusting to different hardware. You have control on different setups that have different install scripts based on what you need when you boot the target machine from the pxe boot menu.

Downside, It's alot of work but once you get it setup you won't have to be worried about that and focus on trouble machines. The O/S becomes bloated from excessive useless modules and packages, but this can be trimmed on the install scripts.



How-To: Unattended Ubuntu Deployment over Network | Debian/Ubuntu Tips & Tricks

Automated Deployment | Ubuntu

check out this thread too.

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ins...eployment.html

Hope this is what you were looking for.

[xlinux1010]

Thanks for the info, I'll look into pxe... however, I should have made this more clear in the initial post...

part of the reason I want to do this is to easily move installed packages onto VPS / cloud hosted machines and on these I can't do a regular installation. The company just provides a base installed system that you have to then add onto, so for now the only way I see to do this is just to create an installer script that I can run on the server, I guess this isn't that much extra work (just takes some planning) but it would be nice to just be able to move over a bunch of already installed packages, I guess there is no way to do this