[KLUG Members] little game of remote installing

[Dirk Bartley]

On Wed, 2003-04-23 at 15:01, Greg Mason wrote:
> Here at Olivet, we have a new Computer Science lab.
> 
> well, we want to get Linux on these machines, but here are the rules:
> 
> 1: No CD-ROM drives
> 2: no floppy drives
> 3: must dualboot with windows xpee
> 4: might have to be installed off of a Windows 2000 Remote Installation 
> Server
> 5: only one drive in each machine.
> 

Installation options for installing Rhat abound.  I've never tried them
all but I have tried cdrom, nfs and ftp.  Network install methods
usually require a floppy in the machine to get the install started.  So
if you have a couple to carry from machine to machine, you could open
them up and install two at a time.  NFS install was a bit easier when it
was one cd.  Ever since RH was two cd's, it was required to copy the
CD's onto a hard drive, and then share that directory via nfs or ftp. 
If I remember right, smb install is available as well.  Can someone
confirm that for me.

> what distro should I use? Red Hat or SuSE? Obviously, I'm a fan of 
> SuSE, but if Red Hat is the better choice here, then that's the way 
> I'll go	

Choice of distribution is a personal choice.  Each has advantages and
disadvantages.  For me I like Bsware because it is easily available
somewhere I go to once a week at the writing of a simple email.

Another option is to only install RH or Suse or whatever distro you
choose on one machine, preferably the one with the most horses.  Then
use LTSP to serve up desktops on all the other machines.  It's common
for these machines to boot off of floppys or flash rom's on the nic's,
but booting from a hard drive is possible.  I've never installed grub or
lilo on a machine without linux on it but I'm sure it would be
possible.  Either boot package is capable of booting an ltsp image that
will download a linux kernel via tftp and then give a full linux desktop
on the client host.  LTSP allows for hosts without disks entirely.

Dirk
> 
> -Greg
> 
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-- 
Dirk Bartley <bartleyd2@chartermi.net>