rance@frontiernet.net wrote:

I'm looking for how-tos/hints to make the following possible:

I downloaded all four centos 4.3 iso to a ext3 partition on my hd, burned the first disk only, and the a hd based install.

Problem: Centos didnt seem to take into account that I was doing a HD based install and and ask me if I wanted to use the hd images as a source for additional appliction installs later. Now it asks me for the cds and I dont want that. I want it to look at the hd for the additional rpms.

boot with the 'askmethod' option, or use the boot.iso to boot the machine, not cd-1.

Catch: The catch is that this "server" will eventually be setup to "feed" the cds out to clients when they install and when they "add apps later". So I'd like to use an implementation method that lends itself to both applications.

I'm open to nfs, ftp, or http content delivery to clients in case one or the other makes a difference.

http is my favorite option. once the machine is installed, setup a repository locally on the machine and share it out via httpd, let the remote machines either pxeboot or use the boot.iso to start the installer and install over the net.

On Monday 03 July 2006 09:26, rance@frontiernet.net wrote:

I'm open to nfs, ftp, or http content delivery to clients in case one or the other makes a difference.

If I wanted to set up and then support a large number of workstations, my answer would perhaps be "hackish" but would work. YMMV.

1) Set up a yum repo webserver on the local network. This makes workstation installations go much faster, and allows me to control the rollout of updates.

2) Set up a single workstation with all the packages that you want. -> Set up yum on the workstation to use the yum repo. -> Use rpm -qa and make a stupid-simple "yum install `rpm -qa`" script out of it. -> Put the yum files (/etc/yum*) and the yum install script on the yum repo webserver as a .tgz file.

3) Install new workstations with minimal installs of CentOS (only the first CD is needed if you choose "custom" and then uncheck all packages) which takes just a couple minutes per system.

4) wget the setup script that you built in #2, and run. Since it's all local, it will install very fast.

With this method, I could probably set up 5-10 workstations per hour if they were pre-built and had a fast network. This method has an additional advantage of leaving the systems preconfigured to get updates that I could control the rollout of.

I would additionally recommend setting up a cron script on each workstation to do updates automatically ("yum update") every night at 3 AM. Grep for "kernel" in the output to toggle an automatic reboot, if it makes sense.

I similar methods to set up Porn-filtering web-proxy servers. (that we sell to schools) Thus, I can roll out security updates automatically for the entire organization in < 24 hours while performing only a few minutes of work.

Again, there may be "better" ways to achieve the above, but the shell scripting to support the above would take me about 4 hours to cook up, and would work quite well.

-Ben