Jeffrey Ross wrote:
- The build hardware won't have a second disk usable for RAID, is it
possible to build the RAID as degraded during the install? Or am I better off building it as a non RAID system and transfer everything to a RAID disk later?
build a metadisk without adding a mirror, done. when you move it to the other system, add the other drive in as mirror
I'd reserve 200MB as e3fs /boot (/dev/sda1), 2GB (sda2) as a metadisk md0 with swap in it, then the rest (sda3) as a metadisk ('raid') md1, then put LVM in md1, and create your / and /home (and maybe /var) as LVM logical volumes, you can do this with diskdruid in the centos setup, its just requires careful attention to the sequence and details.
when you get the other disk online, partition it exactly the same, and add sdb3 as a mirror of sda3 and sdb2 as a mirror of sda2. boot mirroring is somewhat trickier, i usually just copy everything in boot to /boot2
- The system bios will allow me to boot off the network, can I do an
install from that boot?
there is no CD/DVD reader in the box, nor is there a floppy drive.
USB (flash?) may possible,
but it is USB1.0 (1.1?) and quite slow and I'm not 100% positive the
BIOS will support
booting from a USB device.
setup a PXE boot server on another linux machine, and you can install completely off the network. there should be several HOWTO's floating around on how to do this.