regarding the floppy boot disk and HTTP installation

[Paul Howarth]

On Sun, 2005-02-27 at 08:52 -0500, Hacksaw wrote:
> >Both ways are possible:
> >http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/x8664-multi-instal
> l-guide/s1-steps-network-installs.html#S2-STEPS-NETWORK-INSTALL-ISO
> 
> Huh! Okay.
> 
> I was warming up to the idea until I got to the note that you could only have 
> one release (and one variant? what does that mean?) in the directory.

I think "variants" means like the "WS" and "AS" versions of RHEL.

There's nothing to stop you exporting a directory /software containing:

/software/fc3
/software/fc2
/software/rhel4-ws
/software/rhel4-as

etc., each subdirectory containing the ISO images for that distribution
(and only that distribution).

> If you could have an iso directory, and had a general tool that could go and 
> give you a menu of OSes to install, that'd be kind of cool, speaking from the 
> Large Implementation Systems Administration point of view.

You could create a bootable USB thumb drive with the kernels and initrds
for all of these OS's installers available in a menu, enabling you to
choose which OS to install from your NFS server. I've done this myself.

> Oh well, I guess it saves having to teach people to mount iso's, but I think 
> that's a dubious trade off. Perhaps they are reaching for something with that 
> feature.

It saves a step. And if you have a server with lots of ISOs like the one
I described above, it saves you a loop device per ISO too, which could
be important.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>