I'd say the standard netinstall image of debian with a preconfiguration file written to answer the questions presented by the installer (including what minimal packages you want) would be one way to go.
Just watch out as depending on the age of the machines USB boot may not be reliable/possible. Are they all the same machine type ?
Though at a couple of dozen nodes you may want to investigate something like
On 10/05/12 12:09, Clark, Adrian F wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm in the process of building a couple of dozen oldish machines into a compute cluster. I'd like to install a fairly lightweight distro onto them, both to save on the install time and because the machines have fairly small disks. I'm keen to avoid installing unnecessary things such as documentation, X11 etc. I'm generally happier in the debian-flavoured world, and the distro will have to be loaded from a USB memory stick.
Do people have recommendations as to a good distro to use? netinstall distros are fine.
You can see I've spent too much time recently just installing and using Ubuntu!
..Adrian
Dr Adrian F Clark M0PDF WEB: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alien/ EMAIL: alien/at/essex.ac.uk TEL: +44 1206 872432 FAX: +44 1206 872900 PAPER: Comp Sci& Elec Eng, University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK "The great tragedy of science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact" -- Huxley
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