Suggestions for the Installer (regarding network installs)

[Rudi Chiarito]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2003 at 10:34:18PM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> Actually, the rescuecd.iso can also be used for kicking off an install
> and has all of the second stage.  Installing packages from FTP/HTTP with

On a related note, would you accept patches to create "USB boot images",
for kickstarting purposes? E.g. in a cluster you could dump floppies and
CDs altogether, booting installations from removable Flash storage (you
can still use USB floppy or CD drives if you really miss those long
startup times). Yes, you could as well set up nodes to boot from the
net, but some might prefer kickstart's kssendmac option to register an
Ethernet address (and enable DHCP/netboot for it afterwards).

I have been hacking the anaconda-runtime scripts to sneak a given
network driver onto the boot floppy. You need to take out the splash
screen to make room for the extra module - no problem, as it's for
headless systems anyway. It's not much more than an experiment, because
this way only the smallest modules can be crammed in. Not to mention
that floppies are slooooooow. Still, one might have legacy systems whose
BIOS can't boot from USB, so it's not necessarily a waste of time.

The real deal, though, is an image that basically combines bootdisk and
the driver disks. The 65MB of rescuecd.iso - at least in this case - are
overkill. Instead, with something of intermediate size, you could create
a small bootable partition for kickstart, while the rest of the drive is
used by a data partition.

> We're looking at turning on installer images for rawhide.  I've been
> reluctant to do so just because there are nights when things are broken
> because of typos that don't catch them until the next day and then
> having people file bugs for three days could be annoying, but we'll come
> up with some way of dealing with that when it starts to become a problem
> ;-)

Here's a mostly harmless bug for you.

In mk-images::makeinitrd() you initialise INITRDMODULES, but proceed to
use LOADERMODULES.

Rudi