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