We have a wide mix of hardware all running the same SL images and configurations. Most of our hardware is supplied by Dell, with many different models, but we also have a few IBM's and the odd home-built box here & there too. For desktops (we have hundreds running SL... 400 maybe? more? a lot anyway) differences with graphics cards are usually the only thing that may change our "normal" build. We use a combination of kickstart over PXE with cfengine for config changes. HTH, Deb On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 18:36 +0100, John Rowe wrote: > Does anybody have experience of running a single image of SL on hardware > which was not all bought at the same time? Ie, is it possible to buy > machines from people like Dell so that you know that you can buy a > machine in a years time that will be sufficiently identical that a > pxeboot and an rsync to the known image will bring the machine up? > > I'm familiar with doing this for the classic beowulf cluster, it's the > procurement over a period of time that I'm interested in. Does anybody > actually manage this? Obviously we can do it with Macs and OS X, I would > like to be able to do it with Scientific Linux too. I'm relatively > neutral with respect to a vendor like Dell or a home-built solution like > asus. > > Thanks > > John -- d e b b i e m a z u r e k [log in to unmask] system admin . department of computer science . university of calgary