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Customized Linux Installations

Posted by Cliff on from the fdisk-install-repeat dept.

edmz asks: "At work we have about 20 PCs which are all identical. We are planning on installing Red Hat on them but we want to fine tune it for the specific hardware that we have. We would like to install it and tune it on just one box and then somehow make an image or installation from it and store it in CD so that it can easilly be installed in the other machines. We would like to go the CD way, and I was wondering if there is any software that does this or if somebody knows an easy way to do it."

1 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. Two Part RedHat Solution. by Falsch+Freiheit · · Score: 2
    (Note: I've basically done this before, but only from RH4.2 to RH5.2 -- it's probably changed little in RH6))

    1. Create a customized RedHat installation.
      1. Mirror the RedHat distribution.
      2. copy the RPMs you want into the big RPMS directory, remove RPMS you don't want, etc. I'd highly reccomend replacing old RPMs with the updates and grabbing the ssh (etc) rpms from ftp.replay.com. Also, install autorpm and either customize it or make a separate RPM with just the files for autorpm to use an updates mirror that you make.
      3. Edit RedHat/base/comps -- the format is somewhat self-explanatory. For the purpose you're describing, go to the "0 --hide Workstation" section and customize that. It's probably easiest to make that list by doing a completely custom install off of the mirror you made in step one and then doing rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME}\n' to get a list of all the packages that got installed.
      4. run genhdlist on the appropriate directory.
      5. Put that all up someplace
      6. Optionally, do the whole kickstart thing.
    2. Set up an updates "mirror" someplace and point autorpm on all those workstations at that mirror. Presumably set up to only install from your relatively secure mirror and to check PGP signatures, etc...
    You can put your custom install on an NFS mount point or burn it onto a CD (possibly even a bootable CD) and install all those machines... If you had more than 20 machines I'd suggest using DHCP, but you can probably manage without with 20 machines. You still might want to consider using DHCP to assign addresses to minimize how much effort you need to go through when you do the installs.