After months of fiendishly working in the laboratory together with Jeff and Don, We finally arranged a fragile alchemy that created something that had been failing despite our best efforts.

We created a bootable debian 5.04 AMD64 net installer. On a USB stick. Using a Mac.

All of this is significant.  Individually, the parts are easy.  And even creating the net installer on a Mac is cake.  That is, if you just want to burn a CD.  But add in the necessity for the installation medium to be a USB stick instead of a CD, and you've upped the layers of complexity right straight past "hours and hours of cursing this is so bleepin' difficult" to "nobody has ever made this work before."

There are a host of websites devoted to making Linux run from a USB stick. Some of them even offer downloads of various programs created to help you do so. A small group of those actually do work. Not well, not consistently, but work. That is, they work if you're using a Linux or Windows machine to run that program that will help make the Linux OS USB stick. An even smaller set set of these sites discuss trying to use a Mac to create a Linux OS USB.  None of those worked. And none at all seem to help with making a Linux installer on a USB stick, using a Mac. (note there the difference between a USB to run the OS and one to INSTALL the OS)

The Holy Grail.

A Debian AMD64 Net installer, on a USB stick. That boots and installs. Created using the machine that I chose to use, a Mac.

Well, we now have one.

Using an alchemy of clues and hints scattered throughout the internet, after a series of stops, starts, mistakes, bad advice, wrong forks in the road, incorrect ingredients, bad guesses, bad karma, and much cursing I have it in my hand, AND it works.

Using my Mac we have turned plastic into 64 bit Debian installation gold.

And with this, the Holy Grail of USB sticks, we shall bring life to the servers that Don blogged about!