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"Deploying" images rather than installing from the official ISO?

I like my Linux installs heavily customized and security hardened, to the extent that copying over /home won’t cut it, but not so much that it breaks when updating Debian. Whenever someone mentions reinstalling Linux, I am instinctively nervous thinking about the work it would take for me to get from a vanilla install to my current configuration.

It started a couple of years ago, when dreading the work of configuring Debian to my taste on a new laptop, I decided to instead just shrink my existing install to match the new laptop’s drive and dd it over. I later made a VM from my install, stripped out personal files and obvious junk, and condensed it to a 30 GB raw disk image, which I then deployed on the rest of my machines.

That was still a bit too janky, so once my configuration and installed packages stabilized, I bit the bullet, spun up a new VM, and painstakingly replicated my configuration from a fresh copy of Debian. I finished with a 24 GB raw disk image, which I can now deploy as a “fresh” yet pre-configured install, whether to prepare new machines, make new VMs, fix broken installs, or just because I want to.

All that needs to be done after dd’ing the image to a new disk is:

  • Some machines: boot grubx64.efi/shimx64.efi from Ventoy and “bless” the new install with grub-install and update-grub
  • Reencrypt LUKS root partition with new password
  • Configure user and GRUB passwords
  • Set hostname
  • Install updates and drivers as needed
  • Configure for high DPI if needed

I’m interested to hear if any of you have a similar workflow or any feedback on mine.

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

I did the same, exactly the way you did but my “zygote” isnt as advanced.

I should make a raw ISO too, but currently I just use Clonezilla (which shrinks and resizes automatically) and have a small SSD with a nearly vanilla system.

Just because the Fedora ISO didnt boot

Unmapped ,

You should check out Nixos. You make a config file that you can just copy over to as many machines as you want.

wheresmysurplusvalue ,
@wheresmysurplusvalue@hexbear.net avatar

Yeah this is a good use case for it, if I remember right you can also trivially generate a live installer iso from the same nix configuration you’d use to run any usual updates. So you can make a custom installer for your exact configuration and copy that onto a flash drive to bootstrap you into a working environment. I think the live installer would generate something like a hardware-configuration.nix too.

lordnikon ,

that workflow seems fine if it works for you. seems overkill for debian but if it works i don’t see anything wrong with it.

one way I do it is dpkg - l > package.txt to get a list of all install packages to feed into apt on the new machine then to setup two stow directories one for global configs. when a change is made and one for dot files in my home directory then commit and push to a personal git server.

Then when you want to setup a new system it’s install minimal install then run apt install git stow

then clone your repos grab the package.txt run apt install < package.txt then run stow on each stow directory and you are back up and running after a reboot.

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