[CentOS] cobbler installation of CentOS-5.5

Mon Mar 28 14:49:21 UTC 2011
Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>

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?


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland