freebsd mass deployment

[Martin Thomas]

Thanks for the advice given so far, I will have a look at them.

@Wojciech:

Your approach seems too simplistic to me. It might only work under very specific circumstances but is impractical otherwise.

Consider, for example, a network consisting of machines of different types
(workstations, web servers, mail servers, ...) with different hardware
(different number of disks, different processor types, ...) and different
configuration needs (file system, software, access rights, ...). Obviously, 
you cannot simply dd one system to the other. And if you want to change
some configuration files on your machines after installation (I do know
cfengine, by the way) or want to install additional software on some of
them, are you still convinced of your approach? 

Unix tools are great, but your comment looks like an advice to use a swiss army knife for performing a bypass surgery ;).

Martin