http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~franklin/Projects/dphys3/README
author Neil Franklin, last modification 2006.10.27
copyright ETH Zuerich Physics Departement, use under either BSD or GPL license

Introduction to Debian Powered Hosts Yet Simple, Version 3 (dphys3)
Simple Automated Installer (SAI) for Debian 3.1 (sarge)


Aim

This program is aimed at (re-)installing our over 100 Debian systems without
having to baby-sit the official interactive installer for an hours time for
each machine. Aim is to be able to simply insert modified boot and root disks
(or load them from PXE/TFTP), and then walk away, while the machine does its
full install.


Preconditions

This program only works on machines with network, as it loads all its install
code and data and packages this way. At present we only support DHCP, not
static IP.


Tools

This project has produced an script for making modified root disks containing:

- mainly original Debian code
- an preseed file for automating the installation options, no questions
- an included subset of net-drivers.img for the few ethernet cards we use

It has also produced an script for making modified boot disks containing:

- automatic (re-)installation without waiting at boot prompt
- facultatively an own custom kernel (for newer drivers) and a script
  for installing such onto the final system

It has also produced boot CD and netboot support derived from above disks


Side projects have also produced various tools for automated maintenance:

- tool for making own source packages (dphys-pkgtools)
- tool for making an apt-get compatible website (also in dphys-pkgtools)
- tool for auto-installing and upgrading and removing packages from cron/init
  (dphys-admin)
- tool for auto-installing and upgrading config files cron/init (dphys-config)
- tool for auto-compiling optimized kernel variants (dphys-kernel-packages)
- package for using auto-sized swapfiles instead of partitions (dphys-swapfile)


Code

This project is fully open source. Documentation gets written together with the
code. Everything I write is immediately available for download. Current version
is what I am working on, if I write a bug you crash the next day. Older stable
versions are archived as Milestones.


State

Working package, in productive use on over 100 machines.


Installation

There is a installation guide at:
http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~franklin/Projects/dphys3/INSTALL


Usage

There is a quick guide for users at:
http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~franklin/Projects/dphys3/QUICK_GUIDE


Questions

There is a FAQ file at:
http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~franklin/Projects/dphys3/FAQ