December 2005
Beginner
480 pages
13h 27m
English
Content preview from Linux Server Hacks, Volume TwoBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Hack #36. Install Linux Simply by Booting
Let server daemons that are already running in your environment and a simple PXE configuration make installs as easy as powering on the target hosts.
Many distributions have some form of automated installation. SUSE has AutoYaST, Debian has Fully Automated Install (FAI), Red Hat has kickstart, and the list goes on. These tools typically work by parsing a configuration file or template, using keywords to tell the installation program how the machine will be configured. Most also allow for customized scripts to be run to account for anything the automated installation template hasn't accounted for.
The end result is a huge time savings. Though an initial time investment is required to set up and debug a template and any other necessary tools, once this is done, you can use a single template file to install all machines of the same class, or quickly edit a working template file to allow for the automated installation of a "special case" target host. For example, a template for a web server can quickly be edited to take out references to Apache and replace them with, say, Sendmail.
The only downside to automated installations is that, without any supporting infrastructure in place to further automate things, you have to boot to a CD or some other media and issue a command or two to get the installation process rolling. It would really be wonderful if installing Linux were as simple as walking through the machine room (or lab, or anyplace else ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.