Talk announcement – Patrick Fitzgerald – Mass Deployment of Linux with Carpet

Patrick has worked in support, design, deployment and management roles on an international basis for over a 30 years, and he will share some of his knowledge with us in is talk ‘Mass Deployment of Linux with Carpet‘. We will hear all about: ** Required Magic’s Carpet: How we designed a mass deployment system for Linux. **In 2014 we started working with a major Irish bank to help them with a project to upgrade 7,500 Linux workstations across all of their branches. Over the next two years we completed that task – not just once – but on a weekly basis, across 143 branches – with just *two* people, and zero site visits. Our discoveries of their systems and techniques led us to build “Carpet” (formally known as “Snoopea”), a tool to rapidly roll out – and maintain – Linux systems across a wide area network.
The systems don’t have to be desktop based either – so long as the devices are network connected, Carpet can deploy IOT, Server and virtual machines too.
This high level talk is an overview of the journey to take the original CLI based system to a modern, web based tool – including how we used Kiwi (and image builder), and Nuitka (a python compiler) to build certain components. We’ll start from the beginning for those that missed the first part in 2019!