Major events today: Dr. P is in town, I passed my
CCSE exam, Maryna is out of town for the weekend so I'm "batch'ing" it, and I'm using my bachelor time to setup a MPI cluster in the lab. Three machines at home wasn't a big enough MPI cluster to satiate my desires (plus I will need more in the long run). I decided since no one else is ever there that I would destroy the lab. I own it now, it is mine. No more of this windows crap - I'm scraping windows off all the machines that I want to.... with the exception of the mail server and the domain controller *grin* I ask you:
who will stop me?? Hahahaha...
Installing linux is slow, and more or less boring. I am, of course, patching the servers during the initial install and this is taking a long time on SuSE's servers since they just released 9.0. :( What I need is a tool that easily replicates an installation. Something like the Red Hat jump-start boot-disks except on a distribution that doesn't suck. More or less, a tool that would query the RPM (yes the only good thing that Red Hat Linux ever did) database and see what is installed, store the package names and download locations on disk. Then you install the tool on the fresh base system and replicate. If anybody knows of something like this please drop me a line.
Even better would be RPM repository server. A server that downloaded each patch and stored them in a repository, then other servers on the LAN that wanted the updates could use the repository instead of downloading them again from the Internet servers. (Interesting that this is basically the model that I envision for wide-scale distributed systems, hmmm) Something like
SUS for Linux. Again, I'm too lazy to look this up right now, so if it exist please let me know.
