Intent:

• we want to make the procedure for re-installing a PLG machine to be as similar to the usual gradpc way as possible, to minimise confusion.
• ... but we don't want it to be the same image, since PLG have some special needs and desires, so we don't necessarily want to saddle them with all the detritus from the usual gradpc install.
• In particular, they like xhier, particularly accounts management.

So I stole basic from them to use as a testbed.

How to make them PXE boot:

• boot, ^S, choose disable local boot and enable PXE booting.
• reboot, go into BIOS, tell it to boot from network card first: "Default Boot: Network" and "Local Boot: Disable" seems to work best.
• reverse this once you're done, otherwise it'll ALWAYS want to boot from the network.

I considered starting with our standard gradpc image, but that would require much work I suspect, and wind up in the unusual situation of no primary disk partitions. So I booted a recent sarge netinst image. And if we're going to go bleeding-edge, let's go all the way: choose a 2.6 kernel. Use "all files in one partition" option. It made a 512MB swap partition for us, which seems reasonable (at hda5) and the rest was / (at hda1). Good, separate /boot partitions seem to cause as much trouble as they solve...

Post-install, use dselect to grab kde-base and assorted kde-bits (artwork, admin) as well as gnome. gdmconfig to my personal tastes :). Rename cscfadm user to cscf-adm. Install ntp and configure to point on-campus (ns1). Don't forget openoffice.org and cups.

Things to keep in mind post-image:

• ssh keys (we need to save these from the old machine setup)
• passwd/group file entries (these get copied from plg2? but maybe we'll need more groups now)
• other tools that PLG like: ethtool, emacs (20 if we can get it!)
• add group none gid 303 ("none:x:303:") to /etc/group
• set up printing (CUPS?)
• mail setup (Walter?)
• fix homedir ownership
• synchronize passwords with plg2 (run the cron script on plg2)

All that taken care of on basic now, and xh-local-maintenance is clean after this:

basic:/software# ls -l
total 32
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root 4096 Aug 31 17:07 mfcf-basics
drwxrwxr-x  6 root none 4096 Aug 31 17:09 mfcf-misc
drwxr-xr-x  6 root root 4096 Aug 31 17:07 os-extras
drwxr-xr-x  5 root bin  4096 Aug 31 17:09 pattern_dev
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root    9 Aug 31 17:11 tcsh -> tcsh-6.11
drwxr-xr-x  6 root none 4096 Aug 31 17:11 tcsh-6.11
drwxrwxr-x  9 root none 4096 Aug 31 17:10 termcap
drwxr-xr-x  4 root none 4096 Aug 31 17:10 termcap_arch
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root 4096 Aug 31 17:06 xhier
basic:/software#