Hi,
I am after something very similar to nocmonkey if anyone remembers it.
NOC Monkey is a web-based tool for remote server management. It simplifies dedicated server maintenance in data centers by providing administrators with a simple web interface to install operating systems remotely; reinstall servers and recover them from file-system crashes and change root passwords without having to connect the console.
i would prefer it to be something free if it exists i know noc monkey was free for upto 5 servers or something this would be ideal as its for a project.
Thanks.

Hi,
I am after something very similar to nocmonkey if anyone remembers it.
Well, there isn't much out there for free.
RedHat's Spacewalk (http://www.redhat.com/spacewalk/) is the free/open source version of their commercial SMS/SCM-workalike Satellite product and it supports RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS deployments over PXE. If your intended OS is Redhat or Redhat-derived like CentOS you might be fine with just this.
There's UDA (http://www.ultimatedeployment.org) (Ultimate Deployment Appliance) which is designed to deploy lots of OSes over the network but it appears to be languishing as a project. I can't even reach their website right now.
You could take a look at HP's LinuxCOE (http://linuxcoe.sourceforge.net/) solution.
I have no clue how well any of these solutions work.
I'll plug my own humble open source solution, Fastdeploy (http://www.fastdeploy.com), but honestly it's very rough and pretty much a pain to get working. In other words it's very beta. You're welcome to take a stab at it though. There's a demo on the site, an install guide and of course I'd be happy to field any questions you may have.
Beyond that the only significantly mature products that I've found are commercial - Altiris, Acronis, and so on but of course you'll pay bucks for those. There's the KACE (http://www.kace.com/) appliance as well, which also aspires to be a complete systems management solution a la SMS/SCM, LANDesk, and so on.

Go check out http://www.linmin.com. It's not free but it works well and the support is great.

Go check out http://www.linmin.com. It's not free but it works well and the support is great.

NOC Monkey did a good job (I'm told, never used it myself, several friends did), then they were bought out and product was taken off the market. It was image based (but then, hey, MS's new deployment scheme for Windows 2008 Server is image based too now!)

Linmin does provisioning with the OS vendor's HW detection tools (anaconda/kickstart, yast/xml, Windows installer/?, etc.) so we don't need to worry about the server HW config (except for boxes and switch from Linux to w2k3 and those darn RIS NIC drivers).

Linmin's imaging stuff isn't really for cloning unless you have 100% identical servers, then you have to go to each box and spend a minute changing the IP address and such. Ii has its uses for cloning (fully hand-tweaked systems can't be easily replicated by provisioning without a ton of scripting). We use linmin's imaging mainly for DR.