[Gllug] Duplicate debian setup

[Tom Gilbert]

* Simon Stewart (sms at lateral.net) wrote:
> Without going to the hassle of creating a Debian mirror and burning a
> set of unofficial CDs using the pseudo-image-kit, does anyone know of
> a way of creating bootable ISO images from a working Debian
> installation?
> 
> Perhaps a little more detail would help. I have a copy of debian
> unstable running happily on my desktop at work. There is also a naked
> PC sitting in my room at home[1] I'd quite like to have a mirror of
> the installation from the work machine available on the home machine
> (which happens to be completely Net-less)
> 
> There are three possibilities that I can see:
> 
> 1) Burn a set of custom bootable CDs, complete (and replete) with all
>    the .debs available (effectively a snapshot of unstable)
> 
> 2) List the available packages that I have already installed, download
>    those, and then burn them to disc. Then install Debian stable from
>    the discs that I have kicking about, update the sources.list to
>    include the carefully burnt CD and do an apt-get update/dist-uprade

I have about 8 debian machines here. I tend to nfs export the
/var/lib/apt/lists and /var/cache/apt of my fileserver to the other
machines. This means that if you apt-get update on one, they are all up
to date, and that if you upgrade one, the cache is full of recent debs
for the other machines to grab without having to re-download them.

If you were to do this, you could just do:
$ dpkg --get-selections > list
on your primary machine, and then
$ dpkg --set-selections < list
on your new box, followed by a (pretty much download free) apt-get
upgrade.

Burning a CD sounds like a buttload of hassle if you have a network to
hand :)

Tom.
-- 
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   /V\    | Tom Gilbert, London, England | http://linuxbrit.co.uk |
 /(   )\  | Open Source/UNIX consultant  | tom at linuxbrit.co.uk    |
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