Successful Medialess Install of Fedora 11 i386 -- Mainly For Puppet

[Robert L Cochran]

I'm really interested in working with the puppet application, and I just 
happen to have an extra laptop hanging around. Said laptop turned out to 
be capable of booting from USB. I found an old external hard drive which 
formerly booted Fedora 8.

I connected the hard drive to the laptop's USB port.

Went to another machine and mounted the Fedora 11 i386 iso image on one 
of my webservers.

Came back to the laptop and booted Fedora 8. By downloading the vmlinuz 
and initrd images off the web server, moving them into /boot, and then 
adding a suitable stanza to grub.conf, and then rebooting, I was able to 
get a medialess install started.

I had a perfect install experience!

The beauty of it is, because I checked off the Fedora updates repository 
as one of the repositories to use, I got the latest and greatest 
versions of everything. A big bonus was I didn't have to burn another 
DVD that would go unused and land in the trash. 10 cheers for medialess 
installation methods.

As to the puppet client on the very fresh Fedora 11 machine, I'm still 
working at getting it to connect to the puppet server which is on this 
machine. I needed to clean up some of my local DNS zone files. I've 
gotten sloppy over the years and I don't do DNS every day. So I also had 
to read carefully about CNAME records. The 10th time is the charm. 
Tomorrow success will be mine, I hope.

Bob