Is your switch saturated or the Gigabit link that is? Can you add a few more NIC cards to the rpm repository box?
I am not sure what you mean! :-/
Is the backplane of the switch saturated or is the your Gigabit NIC saturated?
If it is your Gigabit NIC, you can add a few more NICs and either use a multiple homed system with an ip to each NIC or trunk/bond them together (this depends on support of your switch, you can get two or even four together) to increase bandwidth available. However, I somehow doubt that this is your problem.
I can prepare close 448 Linux hard drives a day using my two disk duplicators. But with the windows drive I can triple that with ease, because it only dumps the data not the free space too, a dump takes 3 mins for a 3gig install.
So as you can see we are moving huge volumes and can't afford the usual
conventional methodes for installation we must duplicate, and thats why
I wanted a more desktop complete package, so that setting up a master
drive will be quicker. Not necessarily with the latest packages and
apps!
So you are saying with a network install your boys and gals still need to some more installing of apps that don't come with the distro?
Yes! because I don't have a repository, We use std NFS from the ISOs on the server.
OUCH! Why on earth do you not have a mirror of the RPMs and updates on a hard drive or even better a RAID array?? NFS??!!?? From CD-ROMs too? SCSI CD-ROM drives you got there? You are better off using a fast and simple http/ftp server program like publicfile from djb or the myriad other choices out there that are seriously optimized for the kernel.
