Michael Hannon wrote:

> 
> Hi, John.  Yup, Debian happened to the fave rave of a guy that worked
> here at one time, and he got the server set up and working before I
> realized what he had done.  At that point it wasn't broke, so we never
> fixed it, but I want to get rid of it now.

When I first used Debian, I was pleasantly surprised how similar it was 
to RHL, which I'd used until then.

debs, rpms, they're different ways of solving the same problems and they 
do it in broadly similar ways. apt-get was an advantage (and still is).

Configuration files are mostly in much the same places and work in much 
the same way.

otoh SUSE is very different.


> 
> Thanks.  Very interesting and complete.
> 
> I poked around a bit more and finally realized that with a little
> tinkering, we could continue to have this work just as it did on our
> Debian and, previously, Redhat (i.e., NOT Enterprise) systems.
> 
> I've appended a sketch of the steps I took, many of which duplicate the
> things you've already mentioned.  I've also omitted any reference to
> firewalls, etc.  The appended uses FTP, but I presume NFS, HTTP, etc.,
> could be used easily.



> BTW, I was trying to set up kickstart for Fedora 8, which is the reason
> for all the Fedora references.  The server itself is running SL 5.
> 
> 					- Mike

A reason I prefer http is the ability to separate out things by server 
name. I also serve out Debian (needs repair), Fedora and a repair system 
(kubuntu). I'm flexible here.

At work I also do dhcp for Windows installs on one NIC.


> 
> yum install dhcp.x86_64
> cd /etc
>     edit dhcpd.conf
> service dhcpd start

I presume you have the PXE magic.

Here's a cute trick:
class "anaconda"
         {
                 match if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 
8) = "anaconda";
                 option vendor-class-identifier "anaconda";
         }


and then
         pool {
                 deny  members of "pxeclients";
                 deny members of "anaconda";
                 range dynamic-bootp 192.168.9.100 192.168.9.149;
                 max-lease-time 84400;
         }

unfortunately, Anaconda doesn't take any options, it would be cool to 
provide some ks details here, but I can specify different values for 
regular times. To block, nor allow, access to particular servers for 
example.


> 
> yum install tftp-server.x86_64
> cd /etc/xinetd.d
>     edit tftp: disable = no
> service xinetd reload
> 
> (yum install syslinux if it isn't already there)
> 
> cp /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /tftpboot/
> 
> cd /tftpboot/
> mkdir pxelinux.cfg
> 
> scp our_distro_server:/.../images/pxeboot/* .

I've not seen proper instructions for EL5. I like to loop-mount my ISO. 
That has two problems
1. selinux
2. funny URLs in the image.

> mv initrd.img initrd_fedora8_32.img
> mv vmlinuz vmlinuz_fedora8_32
> 
> cd pxelinux.cfg/
>     edit netboot-ks.fedora8_32 (or whatever you call it):
default works for me:-)

> 
>     label linux
>       kernel vmlinuz_fedora8_32
>        append ksdevice=eth0 load_ramdisk=1 initrd=initrd_fedora8_32.img
>     network ks=ftp://169.237.nn.mm/pub/kickstart/xxxxx-ks.32.ftp.cfg

Oh, another reason for http is CGI. I can generate ks files on the fly.

> 
> ln -s netboot-ks.fedora8_32 IP-ADDRESS-OF_PXE-SYSTEM-IN-HEX (A9ED....)

I just let pxelinux do its full search. If I want to, I can always put 
an edited configuration in the way.

> 
> reboot the client and select PXE booting
> 
It's so easy.

-- 

Cheers
John

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