Dealing with the huge F15 initrd

Jason L Tibbitts III tibbs at math.uh.edu
Thu Apr 7 15:58:52 UTC 2011


Perhaps this isn't the best list for this question, but I can't really
think of any other place to send it.

For those that don't know, the F15 installer's initrd is many times
larger than that of previous versions.  This is due to the fact that the
installer no longer downloads a stage2 image over the net and instead
just has everything available from the beginning.  That's all fine and
good, but I have many servers that I install by using the web-based
admin console to SMB-mount an ISO image containing isolinux and a
vmlinuz/initrd pair.  The transfer rate is glacial, and I estimate that
it will take well over an hour just to load the initrd that way.  (It
takes ten minutes to load the F14 installer, and that's already somewhat
painful when trying to do testing.)

I cannot use PXE as I do not control the DHCP server.

Does anyone have any hints as to how I might be able to do reasonable
installs now?  Is there some sort of PXE-like client I could boot from a
CD that would let me grab an vmlinuz/initrd pair from a specified
location over the network?

 - J<




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