How it works…

Rolling out your own installation media (remastering) involves knowledge of APT repositories, ISO 9660 structures, and preseeding. The purpose of remastering is basically adding the packages you need and your initial configuration decisions, putting them together on a media that will save time during installation. As all these steps are beyond the scope of this book, we'll point you to helpers such as live-scripts and UCK.

The second option, installing via network, is covered in detail in the Debian Installation Guide and might save some time as per running around the datacenter with optical media. As per imaging servers, SystemImager and Clonezilla are popular solutions, especially when the hardware matches in terms of disk sizes, and so on. The idea here is to install the system first, configure it, and then create an image to replicate to other servers. With imaging, be aware that you need to change the hostname—in /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname using the hostname command—and any other system-specific data.