1.5. Preparing for a Network Installation
Make sure an installation CD (or any other type of CD) is not in your hosting partition's drive if you are performing a network-based installation. Having a CD in the drive may cause unexpected errors.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation media must be available for either a network installation (via NFS, FTP, or HTTP) or installation via local storage. Use the following steps if you are performing an NFS, FTP, or HTTP installation.
The NFS, FTP, or HTTP server to be used for installation over the network must be a separate machine which can provide the complete RedHat/ directory. Both the RedHat/base/ and RedHat/RPMS/ directories must be available and populated with all files from all installation CD-ROMs.
The directory specified in the following refers to /location/of/disk/space/RedHat/ distribution directory. For example, if you have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0.0 installation files located in /export/rhel/ on the installation staging server, /location/of/disk/space//export/rhel/.
To copy the RedHat/ directory from the installation CD-ROMs to a Linux machine which acts as an installation staging server, perform the following steps:
For each binary CD-ROM, execute the following commands:
mount /mnt/cdrom
cp -var /mnt/cdrom/RedHat /location/of/disk/space
where /location/of/disk/space//export/rhel/
umount /mnt/cdrom/
Note that the Release Notes are not included in the RedHat directory. Unless they are specifically copied over, the Release Notes will not be available during your installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Release Notes are formatted in HTML files located at the root of the disc. Copy the files to your installation directory. For example:
cp /mnt/cdrom/RELEASE-NOTES*.html
/location/of/disk/space/
The Release Notes are also available online from http://www.redhat.com/docs/.
Next, make /location/of/disk/space/
For NFS, export the directory by adding an entry to /etc/exports to export to a specific system:
/location/of/disk/space client.ip.address(ro,no_root_squash)
To export to all machines (not appropriate for all NFS systems), add:
/location/of/disk/space *(ro,no_root_squash)
Start the NFS daemon (on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine, use /sbin/service nfs start). If NFS is already running, reload the configuration file (on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, use /sbin/service nfs reload).
Be sure to test the NFS share following the directions in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Administration Guide.
If the RedHat/ directory does not appear in the NFS shared directory, the wrong path may have been mounted and/or exported.
FTP and HTTP installations also support a second type of tree structure. To make it easier to access the contents of the installation CD-ROMs, mount each CD-ROM or ISO image with the following mount point on the FTP or HTTP server (where X is the number of the CD-ROM or ISO image):
/location/of/disk/space/discX/
For example:
mount -o loop CD1.iso /location/of/disk/space/disc1/