On 4/9/11 5:13 AM, Markus Falb wrote:
>
>> I think I could have done it with http,
>> at least it linked to my web-server.
>> But I agree with you that NFS is much the easier way.
>
> NFS method requires you to run a nfs server. This is not easy if you are
> not running nfs service at your site. You have to setup nfs service and
> you have to download stuff and you need the storage and you need the
> bandwidth.
You make it sound like a hard thing to do. It is a couple of commands and
putting the directory to share in a file. Something you could easily do on a
laptop if nothing already exists, but in most places it is extremely convenient
to have one or more directories that are shared by both samba and nfs so you can
download or copy files from any OS and access them from another without having
to set up something special each time.
> HTTP installs could be pointed to official centos mirrors if you have a
> working internet access. No local mirror needed. No need for a local
> service, no need to download stuff. This sounds easier to me.
Maybe, if you have extremely fast and reliable internet service. I don't think
you can pick up where you stopped after an error. Everyone's situation is
different, but disk space is usually cheaper than internet capacity and you can
use bittorrent to let the CD isos dribble in over about any kind of connection -
and once you have them, you can carry them with you on a laptop drive (or a
phone's micro-sd these days...). Anyway, my impression is that for installing
your 2nd through some moderately large number of machines that don't have DVD
drives, an nfs install is as easy as it gets. For very large numbers where you
don't clone disk images you would probably set up local repositories and
something like cobbler to control pxe booting to a kickstart file. (You can use
kickstart anyway, but without the pxe boot you have to type in the url to the
file that you've dropped under a web server).
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com