Re: Server Setup to boot your PXE client
- From: Andrew Gideon <c172driver1@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:23:19 +0000 (UTC)
On Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:45:57 -0700, Chris wrote:
cp /path/to/distribution/installation.iso/images/boot.iso/isolinux/* .
mv isolinux.cfg pxelinux.cfg/default
#
Just minor points:
We've been doing this for a while, and it's helpful to keep the TFTP area
highly organized. So Fedora 8 kernel and initrd might be stored in /var/
tftp/fedora/8/i386 or some such thing. The kernel entries can be
modified to reflect this.
It's also convenient to have a separate configuration file for each
"major image" (ie. Fedora-8-i386-workstation, CentOS-5-x86_64-server,
etc.) in the pxelinux.cfg area, and then create the necessary symbolic
links from the ARP-named file for a given server to the configuration you
want to see booted. This makes completely hands-off installs quite
convenient.
We actually linked the ARP-named file to a file named with each machine's
inventory ID, and then link that file to the necessary startup
configuration. That makes it a little easier as we don't need to know a
machine's ARP address (except for when its first put into our system);
just the inventory ID (which is printed right on the machine).
I didn't see anything about the actual OS install. You'll want the
installation tree to be available (ie. via HTTP or NFS). You can specify
this URL in the Kickstart file. You can specify the location of the
Kickstart file in the kernel line with an option like:
ks=http://pxeboot.internal.yourdomain/fedora-8-i386-server.cfg
That Kickstart file defines the installation. Again, this facilitates a
completely hands-off install.
I'm not sure which distributions do/don't use Kickstart though, but
everything in the "Redhat" world does.
With respect to setting the NIC to support PXE, this is not really
standardized; one just needs to learn how a particular BIOS does it I'm
afraid. Fortunately, it's usually pretty easy to find.
The other item you might want to consider, for servers, is to also set
the serial port as a console and to do the installation headless. As
long as the BIOS supports this (and many do, nowadays), this further adds
convenience as you can watch the installation remotely.
- Andrew
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