Re: Rebuilding minimal install iso RHEL 4 (U1)

[Aleksandar Milivojevic <alex milivojevic org>]

Quoting Michael Stiller <ms 2scale net>:

> I want to do unattended RHEL 4 U1 (ES) installations via
> kickstart. Unfortunately this is not possible, cause
> the installer wants me to change cd-roms twice.
> This is not acceptable for an unattended install. The installation
> itself is a minimal install with some more unneeded packages removed
> (mgetty, some serial stuff e.g.)
> (actually about 220 packages are installed)
> A DVD image is not an option because not all machines
> are DVD-Rom equipped.
>
> Any clues on howto-rebuild the installation cd images
> for a really "minimal" install which doesn't need that
> braindead cd changes. I tried to follow

You could get more minimal install by doing:

%packages --nobase

That will exclude bunch of packages (and their dependecies) that make 
core+base
groups so huge.  You'd still get some crap, but way less than when installing
base group.  I think this way you'll need only the first CD.

It will also exclude some stuff that you might actually want to have on the
system (up2date might be part of base, not sure).  The stuff you probably want
back (that is part of base) is:

crontabs
iptables
logwatch
logrotate
man
man-pages
ntp
openssh-clients
openssh-server
sendmail
sendmail-cf
vixie-cron
yum

Add/remove to/from the list depending on your needs (I'm using yum for updates
from local server).

Now, said all that, if the machines you are installing are connected to the
network, you don't need any CDs to install (well, you need first one to 
boot). Copy the (entire) content of the first CD onto some server.  
Than cd into RPMS
directory and add remaining packages from RPMS directory of second, third and
fourth CD.  You can make this installation tree available to the clients to be
installed by either HTTP, FTP or NFS.  See kickstart documentation for details
how to specify that you want network install.  For example, to install from
HTTP server, you would remove "cdrom" line from kickstart file, and put this
two lines (change names and IP addresses to match what you have):

network --bootproto static --hostname blah.blah.com --ip 1.2.3.4 --netmask
255.255.255.0 --gateway 1.2.3.1 --nameserver 1.2.3.2 --device eth0
url --url http://srv.blah.com/el4/os/i386/

The first line configures the network interface on the client, the second line
points Anaconda that it should use HTTP as installation method.  Bye-bye CD
changes.

If not using kickstart, you can type "linux askmethod" on boot prompt and
Anaconda will ask you if you want to install from CD-ROM, local hard drive,
HTTP, FTP, or NFS.  If you select non-local installation method, it 
will prompt
you to enter network information before continuing.

If you want to be really fancy, you can even setup PXE boot server, and boot
directly from network (no CD needed at all).

Booting from USB key also works (use diskboot.img), however every motherboard
wants USB key to be formatted in different way, so it is sometimes pain in the
butt to prepare USB key all over again for each darn motherboard you have
(unless you are lucky and all your motherboards support some common 
format). My favorite braindamaged motherboard is one SuperMicro model 
that wants USB key
to be organized like USB-ZIP drive, so basically you need to have partition 4
that needs to be at the beggining of the drive.  But only if partition 
4 is not
marked as bootable.  If you mark it as bootable, it doesn't want to boot ;-)

> I'm not really amused about this. The minimal install
> is also bloated as hell. And this crap is called
> *enterprise* linux after all.

Actually, there's bug report for that ;-)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=139364


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