I was out on a job interview last week. The scope of the project had been presented to me as converting Windows based graphic workstations to Red Hat Linux 8 (8 required by software package). That piece of the project was correct but only represented a minor portion of the entire scope. The company has 300 machines which generate graphics on request. They want all 300 machines to be identical booting from a single image on a server so patches and software installations / upgrades happen once to the central server rippling down to the 300 as the boot the next time.

I've searched news groups but haven't come up with anything. Does anyone here have suggestions on how to accomplish this?

Sounds like CIO pipe dream. The machines would have to be identical machines to evenstart thinking about that. The only thing that is close to that is the linux terminal server project, but that is not what you are talking about. In clustered enviroments they use software to push changes out to the nodes and install them, but having one image on a central server that everything boots from is not reality.

They want you to do that because they are used to being harrassed by windows. In a MS Windows enviornment it is common to use Norton Ghost or a similar piece of software to mirror all the disk drives. If anything goes wrong or any software changes you just remirror the disk drive (usually in a lab with identical machines).

You should let your contact know that this is not necessary under Linux, and that if any changes need to be made across all 300 machines it would be much simpler to write an administrative script that will upgrade the machines while they are still running (unless you need to change the kernel).