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Customized Red Hat Boot Disks

Posted by Roblimo on from the yet-another-installation-trick dept.

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.

5 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmmmm... Security implications? by tgd · · Score: 2

    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.

  2. Re:Good Start! by HoserHead · · Score: 2

    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.

  3. multiple machines by mattdm · · Score: 2
    For one machine, it doesn't make sense. But if you've got a dozen, suddenly it's an amazing time-saver. Pop the disk in, reboot, and wait until it's all done.

    --

  4. So burn your own CDROM by roystgnr · · Score: 2

    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?

  5. Re:Good Start! by HoserHead · · Score: 2
    How about this: the Windows setup program just plain froze on me, reproducibly, on a certain system. No information I could find out about it said anything about it. I'm not even sure how we ever did get the damn thing installed - perhaps we swapped out video cards. The stupid thing was, it didn't even freeze in a hardware detection phase - it froze just before we could enter the serial number.

    The point is, everyone's got their installation nightmare stories. No installer is perfect; however, Linux is just as simple (and conversely, just as difficult) to install as Windows is, in my experience.