[CentOS] best practice: how to setup a central "network installation server"?

Thu Feb 18 09:15:20 UTC 2010
Eero Volotinen <eero.volotinen at iki.fi>

2010/2/18 Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at softdux.com>:
> 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?


See the kickstart at :
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.2/Installation_Guide/s1-kickstart2-howuse.html

--
Eero