On Sun, 17 Jan 1999, m. allan noah wrote:
> ok guys.
> i am currently building a pair of machines from the ground up.
> they will be root raid and all the partitions except swap will be some
> form of raid.
>
> i intend to document the process i go through to get rh 5.1 or 5.2
> installed on these boxes.
I've done this before, but I've got a special setup for installing RedHat:
Since I have to set up many Linux machines, with the same software on
them, it was getting VERY time-consuming to install RedHat from scratch on
each and every single machine, and install and compile additional software
like ssh on top of that.
So what I did was to set up an NFS server so I could mount a root
filesystem via NFS (there's a howto on doing this). I also set up a BOOTP
server so my NFS-root machine could get an IP address automatically.
I then installed RedHat just the way I wanted it, modified config files,
and installed additional software and the latest updated RPMs.
Once I did that, I made a big tarfile of the entire installation and put
it on the NFS server.
Now, when I want to install Linux on a machine, I can install to any
device that I can support with a custom kernel, including root raid
devices, simply by making a filesystem, mounting it, and untarring my
installation on it.
Such a setup also makes it easier to fix broken Linux machines, since you
can boot them with a single disk and have every tool you could possibly
need at your disposal.
Brian
