[CentOS] cobbler installation of CentOS-5.5

Mon Mar 28 15:01:49 UTC 2011
Ray Van Dolson <rayvd at bludgeon.org>

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 03:49:21PM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I'm trying to install CentOS-5.5 on my new HP micro-server, which has
> no CD drive.
> 
> I've set up cobbler and cobbler-web on my old server, and can access
> cobbler-web from my laptop.
> 
> I have 3 queries about the installation.
> 
> 1. Is there any advantage is using the 64-bit CentOS rather than
> 32-bit?
> 
> 2. The CentOS OS seems to be available in 7 or 8 CDs.  (I tried
> downloading the DVD ISO with ktorrent, but this was a complete
> failure.  It started OK, but then created literally thousands of
> links to one file, which brought my server down, and left it in a
> state which was quite hard to clean up.)
> 
> But how exactly do I "cobbler import" these?  I see that for Fedora
> on my laptop I ran
>     sudo cobbler import --path=/mnt/dvd --name=F14-i386
> 
> 3. Is there actually a way of converting the 7 or 8 CD ISOs into a
> DVD ISO?  I saw instructions that suggested concatenating them, and
> then running rsync against a DVD ISO, at
> <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2011-January/104448.html>.
> I tried the site recommended, but could not access the DVD ISO.
> 
> In fact, if I could access a DVD ISO, couldn't I download it
> directly?  So what would be the point of this exercise?

Why not use the netinstall ISO rather than download everything?

Recreating a DVD image from the ISO's _is_ possible, but honestly, not
worth the work, IMHO.

Perhaps the LiveCD ISO would be an option as well (I belive you can
install from it).

x86_64 is useful if you're going to have a lot of memory or large file
systems.

Ray