<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt">I second the approach detailed below. This is almost exactly what we do, but we manage most of it through Cobbler <span> (<a target="_blank" href="http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/">http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/</a>)</span>.</div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><br></div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt">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.</div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt">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. </div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><br></div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt">We have created profiles for both server installs and desktop installs (this is where the kickstart files come in). </div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><br></div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt">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.</div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><br></div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt">All of our machines
get their updates from this server as well, which also saves on our bandwidth.</div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><br></div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt">More Info:</div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><br></div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><span><a target="_blank" href="http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/08/10/cobbler-how-to-set-up-a-network-boot-server-in-10-minutes/">http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/08/10/cobbler-how-to-set-up-a-network-boot-server-in-10-minutes/</a></span></div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><br></div><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt">-Brad<br><br><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt">----- Original
Message ----<br>From: Duncan Hutty <dhutty+wplug@ece.cmu.edu><br>To: General user list <wplug@wplug.org><br>Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 2:15:29 PM<br>Subject: Re: [wplug] Linux imaging<br><br>
<a ymailto="mailto:larry@daberko.com" href="mailto:larry@daberko.com">larry@daberko.com</a> wrote:<br>> Hi, I've been tasked with installing 10 Fedora8 boxes. I plan to make one<br>> master install and copy that to the 9 others. The boxes are all the same<br>> model, if not exactly the same.<br><br>The canonical answer is to use kickstart pointing at a local mirror.<br><br>To create the mirror on my intranet's webserver, I have a script that <br>updates my local mirror of a several things I use regularly but the meat <br>of it is like this (please pick your own best mirror, not <a target="_blank" href="http://anl.gov">anl.gov</a>):<br><br>rsync -aqHz --bwlimit=128 \<br>rsync://mirror.anl.gov/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386 \<br>/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/mirrors/Fedora/releases/8/Fedora/<br><br>Be careful, this gets about 6.5G!<br><br>Install one of the machines by hand according to your preferences using <br>your new repository mirror. During
installation pick 'add Additional <br>Software Repository' and add the url to your webserver's repository as <br>created above: <br><a href="http://host.example.com/mirrors/Fedora/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os" target="_blank">http://host.example.com/mirrors/Fedora/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os</a> shows <br>the directory you need to point to.<br><br>After installation is complete, there is a file /root/anaconda-ks.cfg <br>which is a kickstart configuration file. Use this as a default for your <br>other machines by making it available on your webserver. Once you look <br>at this file, you'll see there are plenty of options for customising <br>your installation. Tweak it if you want and read the kickstart manual <br>for details. Put it on your webserver.<br><br>As the installation cd boots, you'll need to point the installer at your <br>kickstart file on your webserver. To do so, boot from cd and press Tab <br>to edit options, add<br>ks=<a
href="http://www.example.com/KS/anaconda-ks.cfg" target="_blank">http://www.example.com/KS/anaconda-ks.cfg</a> to the boot line which <br>probably begins vmlinuz<br><br>If you've done everything correctly (which includes configuring dhcp so <br>your new machine can get a network address to reach the kickstart file <br>and the repository), then it will happily chug away for half an hour <br>(this could vary widely depending on the amount of software you chose to <br>install, the speed of your network/webserver and your client's <br>resources) until you have another newly installed machine.<br><br>Parallelisation of the install process then depends on whether your <br>webserver can cope with serving multiple GB to multiple clients at once.<br><br>For extra points, you might want to investigate PXE (preboot execution <br>environment) so that you can just turn on the machines and they will <br>start to install. This needs slightly more dhcp configuration
and a tftp <br>server.<br><br>There are some simplifications in my description, but this should get <br>you going. Search the web for more details:)<br>-- <br>Duncan Hutty<br>System Administrator, ECE<br>Carnegie Mellon University<br><br>Please use informative subject lines<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>wplug mailing list<br><a ymailto="mailto:wplug@wplug.org" href="mailto:wplug@wplug.org">wplug@wplug.org</a><br><a href="http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug" target="_blank">http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug</a><br><br></div><br></div><div style="position:fixed"></div></div></body></html>