[wplug] Linux imaging

[Brad Chamberlin]

I second the approach detailed below.  This is almost exactly what we do, but we manage most of it through Cobbler  (http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/).


We have basically setup a PXE "Provisioning/Update" Server using Cobbler.   Cobbler once setup will take care of keeping a local mirror of your repo's, which as mentioned below takes a huge amount of disk space.
We currently have local mirrors of both CentOS 4.x and 5.x base systems as well as local mirrors of all of the update and ancillary repo's that we use.   


We have created profiles for both server installs and desktop installs (this is where the kickstart files come in).  


Cobbler also handles the setup of providing a menu option on your PXE server so when you boot a new machine off of it you can choose which profile you want to install.


All of our machines get their updates from this server as well, which also saves on our bandwidth.


More Info:


http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/08/10/cobbler-how-to-set-up-a-network-boot-server-in-10-minutes/


-Brad

----- Original Message ----
From: Duncan Hutty <dhutty+wplug at ece.cmu.edu>
To: General user list <wplug at wplug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 2:15:29 PM
Subject: Re: [wplug] Linux imaging

larry at daberko.com wrote:
> Hi, I've been tasked with installing 10 Fedora8 boxes.  I plan to make one
> master install and copy that to the 9 others.  The boxes are all the same
> model, if not exactly the same.

The canonical answer is to use kickstart pointing at a local mirror.

To create the mirror on my intranet's webserver, I have a script that 
updates my local mirror of a several things I use regularly but the meat 
of it is like this (please pick your own best mirror, not anl.gov):

rsync -aqHz --bwlimit=128 \
rsync://mirror.anl.gov/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386 \
/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/mirrors/Fedora/releases/8/Fedora/

Be careful, this gets about 6.5G!

Install one of the machines by hand according to your preferences using 
your new repository mirror. During installation pick 'add Additional 
Software Repository' and add the url to your webserver's repository as 
created above: 
http://host.example.com/mirrors/Fedora/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os shows 
the directory you need to point to.

After installation is complete, there is a file /root/anaconda-ks.cfg 
which is a kickstart configuration file. Use this as a default for your 
other machines by making it available on your webserver. Once you look 
at this file, you'll see there are plenty of options for customising 
your installation. Tweak it if you want and read the kickstart manual 
for details. Put it on your webserver.

As the installation cd boots, you'll need to point the installer at your 
kickstart file on your webserver. To do so, boot from cd and press Tab 
to edit options, add
ks=http://www.example.com/KS/anaconda-ks.cfg to the boot line which 
probably begins vmlinuz

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:)
-- 
Duncan Hutty
System Administrator, ECE
Carnegie Mellon University

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