Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Network And Automated OS Installation?

Posted by Cliff on from the automagically-while-I-wait-in-the-other-room dept.

nneul asks: "What options are there for automated network O/S installation? It seems like very few Linux distributions have reasonable facilities for this, whereas many other commercial unices and O/S's do. Does anyone have information or other approaches to doing automated network installations?" Automated install options for most OSes is described in detail, in the full article.

"As far as overall, I've seen:

  • Solaris: JumpStart, no floppy, just 'boot net', works on any NFS server, but does have to have a machine on same subnet as installed machine.
  • HP-UX: Either NetInstall or Ignite-UX, both are boot off network as well, requires an HP to use as install server
  • IRIX: Also has a network boot/configure. Slightly more pre-configuration when you initially boot, but once it's started, pretty much proceeds automatically, any nfs server.
  • AIX: Haven't used in ages, but even the old 3.2 had a way of installing a system image for installs, and the 4.x has some sort of network install utility.
  • NT/Win2k: You can automate most of the base O/S install for these, but will require either using old DOS lanman boot disks or netware boot disks.
  • Red Hat: KickStart, one standard floppy, everything configured on network, well documented, any NFS or FTP server can be used.
  • Mandrake: Apparently includes kickstart since RH based, but has no documentation, and I sure wouldn't trust them to not break it, given that they make no mention of it anywhere.
  • Debian: Doesn't appear to have anything other other than the base install, and very little to no automation
  • Ghosted/Disk image/etc: Yeah, this works, but you gotta have pretty equivalent hardware and partitioning. Forget it if you want to be able to autoinstall to lots of different boxes."

1 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. SuSE/Slackware by jfunk · · Score: 3

    I set up a server at work for installing SuSE and Slackware. It's quite simple.

    With Slackware you can make custom package selection files and install over NFS.

    With SuSE, you can save you package selections to a floppy and use it on many machines. You can install over FTP or NFS. Only drawback is no DHCP, just BOOTP or manual network configuration. The real advantage is being able to install via a 100MB network...

    There's a new tool with SuSE 7 called ALICE. I haven't looked into it yet but I hear it's really powerful for doing automatic installs.

    Also, SuSE's YaST2 allows you to graphically install to a machine over a serial cable, which is really neat for installing servers using a laptop to control it.