Back when I did some small scale sysadmin work, I found that our CD/DVD burners were a lot more reliable as CD burners than as DVD burners. This seemed to be true both of the older Dell ones we had and the newer generic-brand ones. I had much better luck using CDs for basic installs and then fetching additional stuff from the net than trying to use DVDs.
- I also remember the CD burners to be more reliably, but that is my memory from maybe 5 years ago, I almost always use USB sticks these days.
- For local deployments (or even repeated installs due to tinkering-reasons), the best thing to have is a local http/ftp proxy (apt-get install squid).
