[wplug] Linux imaging

[Paul Armor]

Hi,

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Duncan Hutty wrote:

> If you've done everything correctly (which includes configuring dhcp so your 
> new machine can get a network address to reach the kickstart file and the 
> repository), then it will happily chug away for half an hour (this could vary 
> widely depending on the amount of software you chose to install, the speed of 
> your network/webserver and your client's resources) until you have another 
> newly installed machine.
>
> Parallelisation of the install process then depends on whether your webserver 
> can cope with serving multiple GB to multiple clients at once.
>
> For extra points, you might want to investigate PXE (preboot execution 
> environment) so that you can just turn on the machines and they will start to 
> install. This needs slightly more dhcp configuration and a tftp server.
>
> There are some simplifications in my description, but this should get you 
> going. Search the web for more details:)

I can't speak for Fedora 8 specifically (as we're now migrating to CentOS 
5.1, yay!), but I do think that the version of anaconda (which is what 
powers redhat's kickstart) now uses yum for setting up the rpm 
transactions and if the machines can see the install repo(s?) and 
appropriate updates repos, yum automagically applies updates (instead of 
installing old vers, and forcing you to do updates afterwords).

Regarding scaling, it does scale such that you should be able to do 10 
concurrent installs w/ the same ease as doing one.

Cheers,
Paul