mika’s advent calendar – day 21: grml-debootstrap
I wrote about FAI for deploying systems a few days ago – but FAI might be too much overhead if you want to install just some few Debian systems and prefer to use a configuration system like puppet instead. Then using grml-debootstrap might be an option for you.
As you might know grml is a Linux Live-CD for sysadmins and texttool-users and debootstrap can be used to create a Debian base system from scratch. grml-debootstrap is a wrapper around debootstrap for installing plain Debian via grml easy and fast. Installing a small but working Debian system is as simple as invoking something like “grml-debootstrap –target /dev/sda1 –grub hd0 –groot hd0,0” and drinking a coffee in the meanwhile.
Why I mainly prefer to use grml-debootstrap instead of d-i (Debian installer) is that I can use a recent grml live system which gives me up2date kernel and userland supporting more hardware than a stable release of Debian usually does. (So I’m more flexible in installing the system. If the installed Debian/stable kernel might not work I can still update the kernel from the live system until it works.)
Check out the manpage of grml-debootstrap for further details.