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Customized Red Hat Boot Disks
Anonymous Coward writes "I've just opened up FezBox, a site which will build you your very own, customized Red Hat boot disks. It makes installing Red Hat 6.0 a breeze, and once you've got a boot disk created, you can typically do an installation in 5-10 minutes..." This ought to be especially interesting for low-volume clone builders who want a production-speed method of installing RH Linux but don't have a lot of time to invest in coming up with their own "custom" installs.
I don't see the point over modifying the example ks.cfg file which comes with Red Hat. Only that the webbased tool is actually much slower and doesn't offer all the options.
Especially that the ks.cfg created by fezbox.com contains
# This kickstart script was created at FezBox (http://www.fezbox.com),
# your best source for customized Linux solutions.
is a bit of an overstatement, isn't it?
So it's come to the point where "Anonymous Coward" can send in a submission about a website and get tons of publicity by it being made into a News Article on Slashdot?
Seems ridiculous.
It's been a while since I used NFS at all. I remember pain from the last time I tried to make NFS work reliably. Perhaps that has changed (or maybe I just didn't know what I was doing at the time! :-)
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"This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
kernel panic: failed to mount vfs at 08:30
Try searching www.deja.com and find out what happened to cause this after package selection during an RH6.0 FTP install, on a Compaq 486/33 with 12mb RAM and a 350mb HDD.
You won't find it -- I didn't. I gave up and used Linux Router Project instead.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Does the redhat i.d. have a "write config to disk" option. Now THAT whould be useful. Make one install, record the options to a disk, give the disk to the next computer you want the same, and viola!
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
Okay, I'm sure its not the case here, but what about the security implications of this? What protections, if any are there that the install disk this creates doesn't have malicious scripts in it?
What security precautions are in place on the server that hosts that CGI to keep someone from hacking *that* machine, and introducing a change the author doesn't know about to the CGI.
I think its a good idea, but for security's sake, everyone should probably double check the install discs, or if you're not fairly confident you could spot something malicious, use the RedHat-standard boot disc.
Sure most of the install stuff runs from binaries/scripts on the install media itself, but there's no reason a malicious script couldn't be tacked onto the end of whatever starts the install program. IMHO, this is a problem with RedHat in general, since they tend to use a more complex boot process, between the boot disk being FAT, to the fact that most systems end up booting initially from a ramdisk, and so on. It makes it much more complex to keep close tabs on what the system did during the install, and how that install process works.
spelt \Spelt\, imp. & p. p. of Spell. Spelled.
- --------------------------------
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
spelt \Spelt\, n. [AS. spelt, fr. L. spelta.] (Bot.) A species of grain (Triticum Spelta) much cultivated for food in Germany and Switzerland; -- called also German wheat.
smelt \Smelt\, n. [AS. smelt, smylt; akin to Dan. smelt.] 1. (Zo["o]l.) Any one of numerous species of small silvery salmonoid fishes of the genus Osmerus and allied genera, which ascend rivers to spawn, and sometimes become landlocked in lakes. They are esteemed as food, and have a peculiar odor and taste.
Note: The most important species are the European smelt (Osmerus eperlans) (called also eperlan, sparling, and spirling), the Eastern American smelt (O. mordax), the California smelt (O. thalichthys), and the surf smelt (Hypomesus olidus). The name is loosely applied to various other small fishes, as the lant, the California tomcod, the spawn eater, the silverside.
2. Fig.: A gull; a simpleton. [Obs.] --Beau. & Fl.
Sand smelt (Zo["o]l.), the silverside.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
smelt \Smelt\, imp. & p. p. of Smell.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
-----------------------------------------------
smelt \Smelt\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Smelted; p. pr. & vb. n. Smelting.] [Of foreign origin; cf. Sw. sm["a]lta, D. smelten, Dan. smelte, Icel. smelta, G. schmelzen OHG. smelzan, smelzen; probably akin to Gr. ?????. Cf. Enamel, Melt, Mute, v. i., Smalt.] (Metal.) To melt or fuse, as, ore, for the purpose of separating and refining the metal; hence, to reduce; to refine; to flux or scorify; as, to smelt tin.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
yes I've always dreamed of this :) also though you'd prolly want it to be able to produce a config for : 1. when the hardware stays exactly the same from pc to pc, and 2. when the hardware changes :) (specify what changes such as differences in HD mountpoints perhaps... what hw to try to autodetect... video etc) cheers stor
We run a test lab in which we need to frequently rebuild machines with the exact same configuration.
I've always meant to look at the kickstart stuff but just never had the time.
This is the perfect tool for me. The only drawback for me is that we generally use a customized RedHat 6.0 CD that contains some additional packages we use internally.
If they could come up with a mechanism to allow me to specify additional packages then I'm all set.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
I seem to be the only person with any major complaint about COL 2.2, but I had major problems with the install. I have four completely different boxes at home that i tried the install on just to see if COL was any good, and I could not get it even through the install process... I tried on a Dell Dimension, a H-P something or another, a Toshiba laptop, and a cheapo E-machines celeron 366, and install didnt work a single time!
-w00p
think about this-- how many people absolutely hate having to babysit an install...answer questions...disk copy...answer more questions.
:)
put in the kickstart, sit back and relax while IT DOES IT ALL FOR YOU
not to mention that the redhat install questions haven't really changed all that much in the past few years. this makes it nice for using the same kickstart config file for installing newer versions of redhat!
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I don't know where you get the idea that Linux is difficult to install, because it isn't. It just plain isn't. Red Hat's installer is set it and forget it, come back and you've got one installation of Red Hat completed. I've never tried Caldera (too proprietary) but apparently it is even simpler. The only reason it is perceived as difficult to install is because Windows comes preinstalled on most computers, and you don't have to install it. Average Joe User couldn't install Windows if he tried, no more than he could install Linux.
Having said that, I found the Fez deal to be interesting (I only went through part of it, but it looks like a normal RH install process). But it struck me as dumb that they don't give you an option to kickstart an FTP install (assuming such a thing is possible). It would be really easy for me to just take the new machine, plug it onto my hub and fire away. That other guy mentioned that he doesn't have a floppy drive, and I always seem to have a shortage of old CDROM drives -- it's a pain to rip out a CD drive and install it just to do a RH install. And installing via 100Mbps Ethernet is way faster than an old CDROM anyway.
Fez does allow you to install via NFS, but I don't think that's as handy as an FTP install. It isn't for me anyway. Although I probably ought to have installed and set up NFS by now...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Where do i tell it, that i want a disk for an alpha, or a sparc?
Red Hat does have an FTP installation option, as well as an SMB one. FezBox simply chose not to support those (along with the installation from local harddrive option). This is probably because those three methods of installation require extra drivers/applications above and beyond what is built into the kernel (ok, I don't know 100% why the harddrive option was like this), and Red Hat used to require (as of 5.2) a "supplemental diskette" for these installations (now, in 6.0 and RawHide, there are actually two diskettes, one for network installations (bootnet) such as FTP, SMB, NFS, etc., and one for non-network installations (boot)).
I think it's a grain. Left in such a situation I'd rather use Ghost or a shell script to zap the partitions over.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
On the other hand, no FTP is a killer drawback. I don't remember the last time I've done an install that wasn't over FTP. I'm the linux virus at my company (wherever I go, machines suddenly start running linux :-), and I just have the RH6 cdrom sitting in the tray of one of our smaller servers, ready to do another install whenever it's needed.
Basically, this would be cool for many machines, EXCEPT that if I were installing on many machines, I'd want to be doing it over ftp (who wants to screw with setting up NFS if you didn't already need it?). Hopefully this is just an alpha version, and they'll be including that capability soon...
Nice web page though.
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"This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
True, I got colleagues at work to install the Red Hat distro, but because they are linux/unix novices, they had a working system, but didn't know how to operate it (yet). They are tinkering with it now though, and swamping me with questions :-)
One thing that is terribly useful about this method is that when you are presented with the install choices, you are able to do some research on the web or dig through your system to better decide which apps to install. "Do I want X-emacs or no...". The same goes for system configuration.
:)
Newbies may find this especially useful, if even to just practice an installation before the "real" one. The little blurbs in the RH install that describe each app are generally good, but it's nowhere near enough info to make an informed decision.
I agree that an ftp - based quickstart would be very cool.
--==Hail Eris!!==--
I was intimidated the first time I looked at
o /RH
kickstart, but now that fezbox has shown how easy
it is it's going to save me a lot of time. The
%post commands are *very* nice for installing the
gaggle of post-6.0 updates, stripping inetd, etc.
To install from a ftp or http server, use:
url --url http://hostname.of.server/path/to/RH
for http or:
url --url ftp://hostname.of.server/path/to/RH
for ftp. To use a non-anonymous server, use:
url --url ftp://username:password@hostname.of.server/path/t
To use a FTP or HTTP proxy, use:
url --url ftp://server/path/to/RH --proxy proxy.server.hostname --proxyport 201
Let's pretend someone in a "branch automation"
market segment, say a large bank, gas company,
or retailer, wants to do mojo installs and
guarantee that they're all the same.
Imaging disks is one option.
This is another.
'Nuff said.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Ed., Vol 2
Kickstart is very easy to use. There is actually a utility in Redhat called "mkkickstart" I think which extracts a kickstart script from your present install which you can modify to you needs. So very little knowledge is needed.
It did NOT detect the graphics card, and I've NEVER had it detect the monitor, and yes that's made a difference on several occasions. (Especially with another box that had an SiS 5595, another piece of junk embedded video chip. With Red Hat 6 it worked fine, but only after I found the right monitor from the "nameless Dell 14 inch" list. The wrong monitor options included "refuse to run because it can't find a mode" and "loud screeching noise from the back so I shut the monitor off even before I hit ctrl-alt-backspace because I'm afraid smoke's about to come out of it". Oh configuring X is just a JOY...
Also, the modem I pulled out of the drawer for one machine recently had a jumper setting that insisted it was Com 3 according to the little sticker, but it turned out to be Com 11. (Extra jumper to shift the IRQ to 16 bit mode that was not documented on the sticker. Fun.) No Linux install has EVER found a modem on a nonstandard setting automatically (although OS/2 never had any trouble, you'd think that the INSTALL could scan for IRQ's...) This particular joy took 2 days worth of free time (I.E. most of an hour sitting down and scratching head) to figure out. Eventually scrubbed through the man pages and figured out how to run "setserial auto_irq autoconfig", which is remarkably non-obvious when you can't remember what "setserial" is called... But only after a lot of red herrings in the "plug and play" section of the Bios telling it to reserve IRQ 3 for the ISA bus...
I've been banging my head on computers since I was 12, so I've known where to stick the hot poker to get the system to confess most of the time. But a newbie would have given up, and I've wasted a LOT of time setting up boxes.
I still haven't gotten Red Hat 6 to connect to my ISP, the ISP-HOWTO that ships with this version is a JOKE, sentences cut off in the middle and it tells you to make changes to files it doesn't name. It's been a year since I last configured networking, I don't remember this stuff... I remembered where to look it up and it wasn't there, I feel cheated. :P
(I went out and bought a "Linux for dummies quick reference" after that experience with the Howtos... May not have the info I need but at least someone will have read it through before shipping it.)
Oh, another fun little detail: getting to the power down message on shutdown is no guarantee that it won't fsck on the way back up. On any Red Hat 6 system I've seen so far. Dunno why...
You can tell I detoured through OS/2 for a couple of years, can't you... Their hardware detection positively spoiled me...
Still, can't complain. A friend wanted me to explain why Windows 95 was booting into "safe mode". That'll put things right into perspective, won't it? It turned out to be a missing font. Now that's just pure evil... (Strangely enough, Red Hat 6 installed without a hitch on that box, apart from guessing the monitor type again. :) Rob
I was actually in the process of backing up my data to do a fresh install (don't ask), when I got the urge to get online and check out slashdot.
Much to my joy this artocle was here. Perfect I thought, I'll give it a shot.
I went over the web interface till I was satisfied, then did a run for my system.
dd'd it to the floppy.
Copied my data to another system on the network.
Rebooted and made my fat32 partition (dont' ask).
The only thing that I was prompted for was my hostname and domain name.
This is because my system is not a permanent a piece of the internet, and the redhat installer tried to do a dns lookup on my non-routable IP address.
The second part that didn't quite go as I expected was after telling the web interface that I wanted to setup automatically, it didn't gicve me an option to have the system start in runlevel 5.
I hope they can work around these.
Job well done so far though!
#!/bin/bsh ./i386 ./i386 ./i386 ./image.iso \
chmod -R 755
chown -R root:root
cd
mkisofs -b images/boot.img -c boot.catalog \
-o
-J -r -T \
-p Your_Name \
-P www.redhat.com \
-A RedHat_Linux_6.0 \
-V RH60 \
.
Good luck.
Read i386/doc/HOWTO/mini/RedHat-CD . basicly you need to update hdlist. Read the file, and it tells you exactly how to do it. - I had the same problem. :)
I highly recommend buying and installing Caldera's OpenLinux 2.2. If you are looking to pass around a distro to your WinXX friends, this one is it.
My friends have been completely blown away.
It has 100% graphical install and 100% graphical boot. Personally, I would rate the install a 10, NT a 4, RedHat 6.0 a 3 and Win95/98 a 8.
See: http://www.calderasystems.com
Jim
it seems like a valiant attempt to make the lives of some of us easier, but...
for companies rolling out large amounts of cloned RH boxes, this approach
wouldn't be anything short of stupid.
creating one install that's what you want clones of, then creating disk images using Ghost or Power Quest's Drive Image software would be MUCH faster and more efficient...
IMHO, of course.
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Reveal your Source, Unleash the Power. (tm)
Newbies may find this especially useful, if even to just practice an installation before the "real" one. The little blurbs in the RH install that describe each app are generally good, but it's nowhere near enough info to make an informed decision.
Of course... but then, for some (like me), it's more fun (as I noticed someone earlier said) to learn the hard way by installing it yourself using the boot disks (the CD, for me)....
Even though I complained about it (technical difficulties....... you know) I'm still glad I did it myself, and learned.
Insert mind here.
I don't see the point of this. It just seems to walk you through the same steps as a RedHat install, but without the smarts (it doesn't skip the networking stuff if you're not doing a network install, it doesn't know how big your disks are, etc). Maybe if you had to install a bunch of identical machines, it might save you time, but otherwise it makes little sense to me.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
My main pessimism regarding the consumer usage of Linux through its various distros is the difficulty of the install. While it might seem like a breeze for those that know their blackslash from their dot com, the average computing Joe is stumped when it comes to installing Linux. Once Linux moves from the operating system of those in the lofty geek tower to that of the lowly normal human being, it will then be a viable operating system for the masses that Windows has been for the last 8 years. And anyone who has had to install Windows, that ain't too far away!
This FezBox is a good idea, makes it a lot easier to install RH6. Too bad it wasn't around when I was trying to get RH to install ;) - oh well... ;)....I guess for a network, but for a home PC user, whats the point? Just use RH Installation, right?
To tell you the truth though, its probably better for the unexperienced to have to toy with things to get them to work, makes you learn a lot more.....hrmm...maybe this isn't such a great idea after all
There's definitely some potential here. It's fast, too. A neat little Java applet (gasp! did I just say that??) might make configuration a little easier. The partition configuration section could use some improvement, but the limitations are mostly due to those inherent to RedHat's install, not those on the author's part. All in all, I can see it being VERY useful for the less experienced users out there. Everyone loves a nice, pretty GUI, after all. RedHat might consider building something like this.
sKroz
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
what if I don't have a floppy drive? I built my own machine and opted to do without a floppy drive. Granted this is a very rare configuration, having an x86 clone sans floppy, but I think this will be becoming more popular. I was able to make my triple boot machine with the installs from my CD-ROM. FYI, those OSes include DR-DOS (for games and sundry utilities), BeOS 4.5 (very awesome OS), and RH5.2 (to feed my need for *nix).
I'm sure this service will prove very very useful for those that wish to install a custom RH6 on multiple machines (that have floppy drives).
We really really *really* need a breakdown of how those moderators are playing... I could just as easily write a bot to pick out random comments.
--
We purchased two Dell machines destined to be the first two Linux desktops at our work. I'm going to have to give this a try for this!!
Kinda ironic though isn't it? A GUI interface to a command line installer?
The hyperlinked FAQ's and non-linux-guru readable tips and advise (as well as advise on whats on the next screen) are a blessing. Bravo to their good work!
Amiga Kickstart is TM on page 3 in the RKM's.
Linux Kickstart should be ok.
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
Take the Red Hat CD image, the boot image, you get off of this site, pass them as appropriate options to cdrecord (or whatever GUI), and voila. Custom boots for machines without floppies.
Granted, this is a little beyond the realm of "new users that want a neat web-based installer", but for people who want to do many multiple machine installs, this looks viable even without a floppy to do it with.
So how do the guts of this thing work? Does it just set up Red Hat's kickstart system?
kickstart does not work with an ftp install
I wonder if it's saving these configurations anywhere. It's collecting IP's and root passwords. I wonder how many people neglect to change these after they're up and running. I'm not casting doubt on this persons integrity or intent. Honest :) It's just that it struck the cynic in me as kinda odd. tOdd
Read the pages, dude. The page that lets you enter your root password specifically recommends AGAINST doing so! No security hole at all if you pay just the tiniest smidge of attention.
A nice effort and it may prove useful to some. It seems that there are so many different hardware combinations that "one for all" installer disk is not a viable option anymore.
...
Since I do not use Red Hat this may be a lame-o question...
Why no ftp install option for Red Hat? Yeah I know CDs are much easier, but
Seems like this was one reason I went with Debian. Above and beyond the "other" reasons. No Flamewar, Please!
I always wanted to put up a custom kernel burner box. This was an idea from the (386SX 4 meg) overnight compile days which has no merit in this day of huge horsepower on the average box.
FezBox is a nice idea for those who like using those kind of toyZ.
#941
Fezbox uses the Kickstart feature that has been available in RedHat for a while now. Sadly it doesn't support FTP yet, see the Kickstart readme file, it should be in the 'docs' directory I think. So if you want FTP support, bug RedHat with it, or write it yourself :)
Cool thing about FezBox is that it creates the ks.cfg file and then includes it in the image file. Neat.
--
*sig*
echo 'echo "Welcome to yada yada" && passwd && echo "#this would be the standard user bashrc" > /root/.bashrc';
or something of the sorts). Anyways, I think that would be the main application of this very nice cgi, anyways.