pxeboot

Our receptionist PC motherboard was dying, so I threw together a new $400 PC from a barebones MSI box, an enterprise-grade HD, a Celeron 64 bit CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Simple and easy.

Restoring the PC to operational status was very easy because of the PXE boot setup, our Puppet installation, and the use of Duplicity for backups.

I simply booted the new hardware (note the lack of DVD, CD or floppy drive) from the network, picked to install Ubuntu 64 bit and gave it the same hostname as her old PC. Then I walked away. Literally only 10 minutes from unpacking until the PC was installing it's OS unattended.

I came back about 20 minutes later to a newly installed OS with all updates and patches already applied. Then I just ran a single duplicity command line to restore the home directory from the backups and voila!

Yeah, Linux network administration is awesome.

If you're managing a network of more than say 10 computers, keeping them all updated, secured and managed properly is a big challenge. The more computers you get - both servers and desktops - the worse it gets.

Until recently, Windows really held the market in deploying multiple desktops. Active Directory and WDS makes it relatively easy, even if you do need a degree in Active Directory to not screw something up. On the Linux side most of the enterprise management systems were either for Red Hat or commercial products. Please don't hang me if I'm just not aware of them because I only recently started noticing these apps.

Enter Reductive Labs' Puppet. In the past few posts I've covered how to automatically install Ubuntu Linux over the network to multiple computers quickly and easily using PXE, Kickstart and a simple script. Puppet is the icing on the cake and so much more.