@george1421 Hey George 
thanks for your reply! sounds promising! What I do right now is
- Transferring clonezilla via pxe
- Make clonezilla load and etch the image from an NFS server to the new system
- After transfering the image, the system reboots
All that is already automated but a bit fragile and hacky.
I then manually start Ansible to set the hostname, transferring a wallpaper, copying vpn credentials. All the stuff that differs from system to system. Ansible is doing all it’s stuff via ssh, so the only real requirement on the systems is an openssh-server.
My main problem is
- that I have to manually run Ansible
- that I can only setup one system at a time (since all have the same hostname after image transfer, like newsystem.local (and I also do not have their ips)
I would look for a way to automatically detect a new system in the network, “provisioning” it with an image (since that is faster than using foreman e.g.), and then automatically adjusting a couple of files and settings as needed. Clicking some buttons and writing something is fine, as long as everything else is then running without an operator and as long as I can setup more than one system at once
Ansible is not absolutely needed, it’s just how I did it so far
Another possibility would be to e.g. transfer different data inside the image, or completely different “data” partitions, depending on the host. Is that possible maybe? Like keeping the rootfs img the same on all systems but transfering different images for another partition.