The cluster group consists of 6 FTE who maintain about 400 Athena workstations in general-use clusters and also service hundreds of departmental Athena workstations. About a hundred new workstations need to be installed en masse during a short period during the summer. Once school is in session, hacked or non-functional workstations need reinstallation. The cluster group does roughly 140 reinstalls per semester.
An install or reinstall involves inserting the install media (if applicable), typing a small number of configuration variables (e.g. IP address), waiting for the install media to pop out, and then letting the installation process continue over the network.
To keep this job manageable, the following requirements must be met.