Updated F10 install media - like a "rollup" disc

[Jussi Lehtola]

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 11:29 +0100, Paul Furness wrote:
> Hi, folks,
> 
> I run a network in a computing research lab. All my servers (about 25 or 
> so) run Fedora, as do a number of my workstations. Because of this, I 
> often need to build new machines from scratch, and time is, of course, 
> short, and I end up spending a lot of time doing a basic install, then a 
> full update of everything.

You can use revisor to create new distribution CDs, but I'd go for the
following:

Make a local mirror of the Fedora repository on one of your boxes
(update it with rsync in your crontab), and make it available to the
other ones by HTTP.

Form a kickstart file with e.g. system-config-kickstart. Be sure to
enable the Everything and Updates repositories, with the address being
that of your local mirror. Make the kickstart available on the HTTP
server as well.

Whenever you install a system with the kickstart, it automatically
installs the newest versions available of the packages you want. To
install using the kickstart just boot with a Fedora CD and in the GRUB
menu type
 linux ks=http://server/path/to/kickstart/file


Your install image will be always up-to-date, and there's little
hassling around with CDs; you just need to burn one for every version of
Fedora you use (or, if you want, you can combine multiple versions and
architectures on a single CD since the vmlinuz and initrd.img that are
needed to boot take very little space).

If you have a DHCP server, you can even configure PXE boot (then you
also need a TFTP server). After that (re)installing is as easy as
pressing F12 (or whatever triggers PXE boot on your box) and choosing
the right option from the network boot menu. You can have separate
kickstarts for all of your boxes, the right one for the box in question
will automatically be used. This can be a bit tedious to set up, though.

Of course, the same thing applies also for CentOS.
-- 
Jussi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola at fedoraproject.org