[CentOS] best practice: how to setup a central "network installation server"?
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Thu Feb 18 13:49:10 UTC 2010
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to setup a central installation server, but haven't done this
> before, so I want to find out what would be best practices for this?
>
> The server I have already runs as a central repo, which is updated from
> one or our local centos mirrors, and the other CentOS servers (both i386
> & x64), as well as CentOS VPS's get their updates from this server.
>
> But, now I want to allow a client to perform a quick network
> installation, using either a netbood CD, or preferably with the server's
> network bootrom. I understand this can be done with bootp, or am I on
> the wrong track?
>
> the server is a general file server and also acts as our in-office
> internet gateway, and has Webmin installed for convenience sake. I don't
> know if this is of any use?
>
> Generally we would be (re)installing CentOS servers & desktops, but I
> guess it could be useful for other distro's like Fedora Core / Debian /
> FreeBSD? / etc. What would be a good option to go for, or could someone
> point me to a good documentation? Doing a google search I found a lot of
> instructions on how to perform a network installation on the client
> PC's, but not how to configure the server. Maybe I used the wrong key words?
If you want to do disk cloning (any OS, including windows) or PXE boot into a
running, look at drbl and clonezilla http://drbl.sourceforge.net/. You can find
a yum repository for Centos in the list at http://drbl.sourceforge.net/one4all/.
It has a menu configuration that I think can be made to boot into an installer
but I've never used it that way since our machines are mostly identical and a
lot of them are windows based.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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