Unattended Debian Installations (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the preseed.cfg)

A CMR project recently bought 12 new Dell PowerEdge SC1435 servers to replace some of our aging compute cluster systems. In previous server rollouts, I’d generally get one system installed and configured, image it with SystemImager, and then PXE-boot the rest of the systems to pull that image. However, it’s tough to audit exactly what …