Score:1

Mass production for Ubuntu systems

ve flag

I'm working on a project that is based upon an industrial PC. It runs Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop. Right now I finished the development and I have a PC with a ready-to-use environment:

  • customized Ubuntu installation (removed unused packages, added other ones, udev rules, configurations for services, etc...)
  • end user applications, resources, web server, ...

The boss is asking: "well, let's be ready to prepare 50 PCs like this one". The PCs are identical of course.

My first thought is to clone the SSDs (one for / and home, another for media contents) with Clonezilla.

I read several tutorial on the Internet that explains how to save the images of the HDDs and how to restore them.

But I wonder about the fstab for example:

# <file system>                           <mount point>   <type>  <options>                    <dump>  <pass>
UUID=a2063e54-9179-4855-8d24-173faf9e54b0 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro            0       1
UUID=82AB-EC9F                            /boot/efi       vfat    umask=0077                   0       1
/swapfile                                 none            swap    sw                           0       0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/f6de388b-fe5a-4a23-a3c1-d87eb32f745a /mnt/resources auto nosuid,nodev,nofail 0       0

After write back the original image to a new PC, would the o.s. even run? Or will it fail because the wrong UUIDs?

What's the correct approach to prepare a "mass" production cloning an existing system?

I'm not afraid about hostname or network configuration because I wrote a simple script that runs once at first boot. The problem is reach the first boot!

Artur Meinild avatar
vn flag
Without having expertise knowledge about it, I believe you should look into an automation tool (like Ansible) for tasks like this.
Score:1
in flag

If you need to do this in a consistent fashion, Canonical’s Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) is worth a look. It makes life a whole heck of a lot simpler.

Be sure to also examine Landscape, which will drastically simplify updates, custom repositories, software deployments, and health monitoring.

These two tools have saved me (and my employer/clients) several thousands of hours per year.

mangohost

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.