http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~franklin/Projects/dphys3/README author Neil Franklin, last modification 2005.12.16 copyright ETH Zuerich Physics Departement, use under either BSD or GPL license
Introduction to Debian Powered Hosts Yet Simple, Version 3 (dphys3) Simple Automated Installer (SAI) for Debian 3.1 (sarge)
Aim
This program is aimed at (re-)installing our over 100 Debian systems without having to baby-sit the official interactive installer for an hours time for each machine. Aim is to be able to simply insert modified boot and root disks (or load them from PXE/TFTP), answer a few questions and then walk away, while the machine does its full install.
Preconditions
This program only works on machines with network, as it loads all its install data this way. At present we only support DHCP, not static IP.
Tools
This project has produced an modified root disk containing:
- mainly original Debian code
- an preseed file for automating the installation options, no questions
- an included subset of net-drivers.img for the few ethernet cards we use
It has also produced an modified boot disk containing:
- automatic (re-)installation without waiting at boot prompt
- facultatively an own custom kernel (for newer drivers) and a script for installing such onto the final system
It has also produced an boot CD and netboot support derived from above
Side projects have also produced various tools for automated maintenance:
- tool for making own source packages (dphys-pkgtools)
- tool for making an apt-get compatible website (also in dphys-pkgtools)
- tool for auto-installing and upgrading and removing packages from cron/init (dphys-admin)
- tool for auto-installing and upgrading config files cron/init (dphys-config)
- package for using auto-sized swapfiles instead of partitions (dphys-swapfile)
Code
This project is fully open source. Documentation gets written together with the code. Everything I write is immediately available for download. Current version is what I am working on, if I write a bug you crash the next day. Older stable versions are archived as Milestones.
State
First milestone release
Installation
There is a installation guide at:
http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~franklin/Projects/dphys3/INSTALL
Usage
There is a quick guide for users at:
http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~franklin/Projects/dphys3/QUICK_GUIDE
Questions
There is a FAQ file at:
http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~franklin/Projects/dphys3/FAQ