Baracus was going to be awesome.

No, not a team. Unless you think of a team of people working on a project to make your network install of that latest release easier. Or, unless maybe you're thinking of a team trying to manage the way your systems boot.

Baracus: "Boot and build served your way." Well, ok, yeah, it's the tag-line, and it's descriptive of what the core of the project is about.

Baracus is about building systems, from vendor released ISOs. Baracus also provides for deploying some snarfed up disk image, or a programmatically produced "appliance" disk image from say SuSE Studio, or one you like made by someone else shared in the corresponding SuSE Gallery. And Baracus allows users to craft lots of customizations into those builds and do some interesting things following image deployment as well.

Baracus is about creation and use of network install sources for openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu (both desktop and server), and dare they mention support for more commercial distributions like Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and dun dund daaaaaa... Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. And for all of these you can craft your install with native install formats, autoyast, kickstart, preseed,and unattended script. This tool will help manage those scripts, and more.

Baracus is about boot management using the glorious and powerful gPXE project's undionly images (non-NIC rom). The beauty of the gPXE project (that was once called etherboot, and is now disappointingly forked into gPXE and iPXE) is that it layers so much goodness over PXE boot. And with that goodness they avoid most all the TFTP choking on it's own spew with timeouts and other unreliableness (and replace it with DHCP net0 unreliableness that I'm sure the gPXE folks hope to work out). What you do get with gPXE is http, and iSCSI and AoE and just generally more networking choices for your PXE booting pleasure. Hey, the project is liked by the KVM folks so much they use it for their BIOS/NIC 'network' bootloader.

Baracus with gPXE allows for some really interesting directions to be taken with every node PXE boot. And that, with some custom workloads, is where the boot management comes in, with tasks like hardware inventory collection (currently using HardWare LiSter), disk wipe from the powerful DBAN and more.

Baracus is coming. Baracus is going to make some serious system administrators out of otherwise ordinary users. Hummmm, maybe that's the new tag-line.

Disclaimer: This is a personal opinion, vaguely informative, post about a defunct open source project called Baracus, and is not meant for any commercial endorsement or influence on decision making.