There were a few of you at the PLUG meeting that figured I was just biased towards Debian without giving DedRhat and RPM a fair shake for consideration with KickStart. I only plan to use tar,cpio,nfs,samba,dpkg,apt,ssh,FAI,and cfengine to make the Sysadmin function a breeze thru automation/scripting. I picked Debian because all of the tools I need will be or already are cleanly integrated into the distribution. I also have a set of home grown scripts I have already written that do most of this work already. Please look at the URLs below. Feedback welcome and encouraged. http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/ FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) FAI will be fully integrated into Woody but is available for use today. http://www.iu.hioslo.no/cfengine/docs/cfengine-Tutorial.html GNU cfengine Tool for configuring and maintaining network machines The main purpose of cfengine is to allow the system administrator to create a single central file which will define how every host on a network should be configured. It is the hardest to set up but pays big in the long run. http://www.iu.hioslo.no/cfengine/cflinks.html Try this link to look at some of the other kickass tools for Automated System Admin. NOTE: The trick is to not let anyone know you are using these tools so you can spend more time on the golf course while looking like a member of the Sysadminerati Illuminatus[1] to the common l^Huser folk as they stand in awe of the miracles being performed on the servers even when you aren't there. [1] Enlightnened System Administrator Social Class Jean Francois Sends... President & CEO - MagusNet, Inc., MagusNet.com, MagusNet.Gilbert.AZ.US Director Of Managed Services - OpNIX,Inc., www.opnix.com OpNIX - Simply Supernatural Bandwidth 602-770-JLF1 - Cellular, ICQ: 8137851