Hey Thomas, Thomas S Hatch [Fri, Apr 01, 2011 at 05:27:16PM -0600]:
I really need to get my stuff on this out into the wild, I use ramdisk network boots, I had to modify the mkinitcpio but it works amazingly well. So I never install systems, I just reboot them into new root images.
Interesting approach, we're doing something similar with nfsroot sometimes. Though for this issue in particular, I'm more interested in installing real systems, so I could in theory drive my business with archlinux.
The problem is that I need to refine it a great deal.
If you are however interested in automating virtual machine installs you can use varch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Varch
Had a look at that, does not really match what I'm searching for.
Also, are you using puppet? I could not live without it in the datacenter.
We've just migrated away from puppet to cdist for various reasons, including, but not limited to push vs. pull approach, no high level language / interpreter requirements and hopefull more clean error messages. You can find more about cdist at http://www.nico.schottelius.org/software/cdist/. Cheers, Nico -- PGP key: 7ED9 F7D3 6B10 81D7 0EC5 5C09 D7DC C8E4 3187 7DF0