Debian installation on cluster

alwaysastudent

Hello everyone,

I have an old cluster [30 nodes, specs on each node[2GHz processor, 512MB RAM[[. The nodes have Debian 2.0 installed and I want to upgrade all nodes to Debian 5.0 stable version.

Is there a painless way to do it other than taking each node out, attaching it to a monitor to it and installing by DVD ?

The cluster is used mainly for computation purposes, so we don't need any desktop packages on it, only development libraries and programming languages.

Can anybody point me in a helpful direction to proceed.

Thanks a lot.

mfillpot

You could attempt to build a local repo with all packages you wish to have on the cluster and schedule each node to check your mirror and upgrade all packages to keep them synchronized.

alwaysastudent

Thanks for the pointer, do you know of any detailed how tos or documentation that could guide me through the steps ?

Thanks again.

mfillpot

The first hit on google was http://mediakey.dk/~cc/howto-create-your-own-debian-or-ubuntu-package-repository/, but I'm sure that you can find many other guides to building your own repo.

mfillpot

Also, if you can do some research into deb package management you can potentially build custom packages to be served by your repo server that include the necessary configuration files and modifications specific to your cluster.