Here is a mini howto install a RedHat distro on a machine which does not have a cdrom player, but a nic with etherboot.
In this example, I will detail how I installed a dual cpu Opteron with Etherboot on an eepro 100 from my laptop running Fedora core 3.
- Get the iso images from RedHat and store them into /home/iso
- mount the iso images :
mkdir /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc1 /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc2 /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc3 /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc4 mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro /home/iso/rhel-3-AMD64-disc1.iso /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc1 mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro /home/iso/rhel-3-AMD64-disc2.iso /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc2 mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro /home/iso/rhel-3-AMD64-disc3.iso /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc3 mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro /home/iso/rhel-3-AMD64-disc4.iso /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc4 - concatenate the iso images on a ftp server
mkdir /var/ftp/rhel-3-AMD64 mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc1=ro:/mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc2=ro:/mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc3=ro:/mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc4=ro none /var/ftp/rhel-3-AMD64 - Start the ftp server if necessary
service vsftpd start - create the boot image
cd /tftpboot cp /var/ftp/rhel-3-AMD64/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz /var/ftp/rhel-3-AMD64/images/pxeboot/initrd.img . mknbi-linux --output=kernel.nbi vmlinuz initrd.img - update the dhcp server configuration. here is a sample :
ddns-update-style interim; subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { option vendor-encapsulated-options 3c:09:45:74:68:65:72:62:6f:6f:74:ff; host rhel { hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx; fixed-address 192.168.0.2; filename "kernel.nbi"; } } - restart the dhcpd server
service dhcpd restart - Boot the target machine, enter the bios and choose to boot on the eepro card
- The machine is now booting on the image it got from the network
- Choose a ftp install, choose dhcp, enter the ip adress of the ftp server and the directory </ol> And now it is just like a normal install !