A nonprofit has received a donation of a large number (>100) decommissioned workstations. What would be the most efficient method of taking a standardized ISO image of a Debian Linux distribution (for example, Ubuntu LTS 14.x), and installing that on the formatted hard drives on each PC? Keep in mind, these are very different makes and models of laptops and desktops, but they share minimal specifications.
I'm sure some of you corporate system administrators have best practices on deciding whether (and how) to clone drives, ghost drives, copy drives network deploy, or manually install – given a workforce of one technician assigned to the task.
I am conflicted over the risks of copying drives (since they are a mixture of sizes and SATA and IDE interfaces), and the lag time to pull a gigabyte image over a SOHO 100Mbps Ethernet to multiple machines at a time.
What should the nonprofit volunteer technician do?
Best Answer
For debian like systems you can use Fully Automatic Installation: