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[Eleven2 Hosting]

OS Image Install Server

We are about to make a decent sized purchase of servers and in the past we have always just put a Centos DVD in the server and left there and booted to it if we ever needed to reload and it worked great.
But I wanted to find out from you guys if there is software/web base control panel or such that can reload the servers with whatever image we want through PXE or something along those lines?





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[datums]

take a look at kickstart and pxe





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[eger]

I have looked and couldn't find a solution that bundled PXE with an easy to use control panel for loading images to boot from. I started doing this myself using a mix of BINL, PXE, and SYSLINUX. I was able to get to the point of having a loader which presents a menu to boot from various Windows and CentOS images and did work. But there always ended up being certain hardware that didn't quite work right, a specific driver that might be missing for PXE, or other random hangs and crashes.
In the end the project got put on the back burner because it was just too unreliable when used over a broad range of hardware. Just having the data center stick a CD in the drive was much faster and simpler in the end.
I would be interested if there is any other linux based software to aid in automated remote installs though.

[cwl@apaqdigital]

Quote:



Originally Posted by Rodney-E2


We are about to make a decent sized purchase of servers and in the past we have always just put a Centos DVD in the server and left there and booted to it if we ever needed to reload and it worked great.
But I wanted to find out from you guys if there is software/web base control panel or such that can reload the servers with whatever image we want through PXE or something along those lines?


supermicro's IPMI solution does allow you to use "virtual media" over LAN to install any OS from the CD/DVD drive on your own local workstation via "IPMIVIEW" window. IPMI allows 2x virtual media devices (can be one CD drive for OS install disc plus one floppy drive for driver disk).





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Last edited by cwl@apaqdigital : 10-29-2008 at 01:48 PM.

[Adam-AEC]

Quote:



Originally Posted by eger


I would be interested if there is any other linux based software to aid in automated remote installs though.


Serverminds (from WHT) was working on a PHP script that would create pxelinux boot files and such.
Redhat has a product called Cobbler (https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler).

[Panopta]

In my past life, we setup a complete system for automatically deploying servers based on Debian's FAI system (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/). After mapping a machine's MAC address to it's intended purpose, all you had to do was turn on the machine and it would PXE boot, find the FAI server and begin the installation. It took a little while to get everything setup, but once it was done it made imaging servers a snap - one time we racked several racks of machines and had them all imaged within minutes of the last one getting cabled.
According to the FAI website, it looks like CentOS and other RH-variants are supported now as well, so it's probably possible now to use FAI without converting to Debian.





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[fastdeploy]

Quote:



Originally Posted by Adam-AEC


Serverminds (from WHT) was working on a PHP script that would create pxelinux boot files and such.


Thanks for the plug It's called Fastdeploy and is very beta right now but you're welcome to look at it. I am working avidly on more or less a significant re-write and creating a completely new interface using ExtJS. The 0.3 beta is serviceable to automatically generate scripted PXE-based installs for RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows and so on but takes a fair amount of configuration on a server to get it ready to serve up automated installs of several OSes. There is an install guide available here.
You might want to look at Ultimate Deployment Appliance, a VMware appliance that has similar functionality to Fastdeploy. As I write this I can't seem to get to their website but there's some info on VMware's community site and perhaps a way to download the VM.
It seems that NOCmonkey was killed off after PSoft bought them but perhaps pieces of it have been integrated into their other solutions.
Quote:


Redhat has a product called Cobbler (https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler).


Yes and they also have a Web/GUI interface for Cobbler called Spacewalk, which is the freeware/open source version of RedHat's SMS-workalike, Satellite. It performs automated PXE-based loads of RedHat and Fedora though I haven't actually tried it.
On the commercial side there's also Altiris and Acronis for image-based deployments and there's KACE, who develops an appliance for deployment called the KBOX - though, like Spacewalk and Microsoft's SMS/SCM solution, it also aspires to be a systems management solution in addition to an automated deployment solution.





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[eger]

Very interesting stuff. Looks like I may have to bring back my project from the dead with these new applications to help assist

[senne]

have done that before under gentoo,follow the gentoo wiki and not that hard at all
it's a shame that site is down,I'm wondering is the guy hosted that server in wht





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[x86brandon]

Another vote for Cobbler. I use a combination of Cobbler+CFEngine. It works great.





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[KDAWebServices]

CentOS comes with everything needed from memory, pxeos is the command, not terribly difficult to use and you can use it with kickstart files if you need to.





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