Customized Linux Installations 10
edmz asks: "At work we have about 20 PCs which are all identical. We are planning on installing Red Hat on them but we want to fine tune it
for the specific hardware that we have. We would like to install it and tune it on just one box and then somehow make an image
or installation from it and store it in CD so that it can easilly be installed in the other machines. We would like to go the CD way,
and I was wondering if there is any software that does this or if somebody knows an easy way to do it."
Red Hat KickStart (Score:1)
This is exactly what the KickStart file is used for, it allows you to select the packages, etc, that will be used for the installation.
You can find info in the RedHat manual once you have installed it, or online at:
Steve
LRP (linux router project) (Score:1)
I think what you need to look at is LRP (linux router project). At the red hat certification class, we booted off a floppy and basically ghosted our machines with a copy of nt server. This can be used with any image.
The method we used, the floppy booted, mounted a nfs share, and basically cat'd a file to
There's probually no reason why you can't pull the image from a cdrom just as easily.
LRP is just a kernel small enough to fit on a floppy, with room to spare for scripts.
So if you built a system, fine tuned and customized it, you can make an image, then 'ghost' it to other machines.
Hope this helps out.
Here's some links:
http://www.linuxrouter.org/
http://math.nyu.edu/phd_students/wilkinsm/linux
ghost=dos program that does the same, but LRP is much easier
Re:auto kickstart on the web (Score:1)
www.fezbox.com
Why was this post moderated to -1? I found it to be actually useful.
simplistic solution -Re:LRP (linux router project) (Score:1)
Prepare a Linux bootdisk which can provide you with an ISO9660 (=CD) filesystem.
Boot the PC with the Linux bootdisk, mount the CD and copy the image file back to the harddisc.
That's all. (Disclaimer: copying the image from CD to harddisc will destroy all and any data that was on that PC)
another way (Score:1)
Anyway, here's a non-linux solution.
*gasp!*
Try using Powerquest's Drive Image program. We've used it here and it works well enough with Linux. You make your installation on one machine. Boot to DOS with a floppy and make an image of the hard drive (you'll need to put it up on a server or another hard drive or something.) Then just burn the image on a CD and blast it out on the other computers. It's relatively easy (though the version you'll need to buy is pricey.)
Another program which does the same thing AND does IP multicasting (allowing you to update the other computers across the network all at the same time) is Norton's Ghost.
Anyway, just another method.
Re:another way (Score:1)
This is fine so long as you've got a hard drive image that'll fit on a cd. But with a 650MB cdrom and a 18GB hard drive... I don't think it will work all that well. (note: I haven't tried this myself, it's just my understanding of how ghost works)
Basically, you know that whatever solution you use should probably use linux, as it should understand ext2fs, but once you get past there, there's a lot that you can do. dd an image from an nfs server, use kickstart, or for that matter, use tar. The biggest problem that I see is partitioning the drives in the first place. One of the nicest things about ghost is their gdisk program. (a completely command line scriptable replacement for fdisk. extremely customizable and very nice. If anyone knows of a similar tool under linux, let me know.)
-joe
Slack scripts (Score:1)
Not sure how Red Hat installs though, I was never a fan.
Two Part RedHat Solution. (Score:2)