[svlug] Lots o' disk space

[Aaron Porter]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 12:11 PM, Marc MERLIN <marc_news at merlins.org> wrote:
> That's indeed how I often do it. I'm pretty ignorant of recent installers
> because I plain don't use them.
>
> I think I installed linux 4 times over the last 15 years or so:
>
> Every other time, I booted from some kind of bootable linux media,
> partitioned the target machine, and copied an existing install over via nfs
> or nc | tar
>
> By far the best way to get what you want.

Oh, I so disagree! I've probably installed Linux (Debian) over 20,000
times in the last two years (mostly unattended, but still). I belong
to the school of "automate your installs, package your configurations,
start from bare metal every time". I've found that the "clone" method
*always* leads to cruft creep and subtly broken changes that propagate
across your entire network. Cloning an install may be practical for a
home system or two, but if you're facing an 80 host webfarm or a
compute cluster with 500 nodes a clean install always works better for
me.