[WBEL-users] Install on headless server?

[Kirby C. Bohling]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 02:45:31PM +0100, David Wynter at roamware wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> New to WBEL4 and also installing on rack servers without a video card. I
> have a few questions someone may be able to help me with.
> 
> 1. Can I do an install from a USB connected CD ROM drive? The Asus K8N DL
> supports a boot from a USB device (I think). If not other options are across
> a network, support for that?
> 2. Can I do an install that will use a serial port 8n1 console?
> 3. Does WBEL4 support the fairly new NVidia nForce4 Pro chipset and RAID1 as
> supported by this chipset?

David,

    I do unattented installs all the time.  Kickstart is what you
are looking for.  I have no idea if you can install from the USB
CD-ROM.  It will depend on if the BIOS on the Motherboard will make
that available for booting.  It's my understanding you can boot from
a USB memory stick with some BIOS's (never seen it done, but I've
talked with people who claim to have done it).

    If you can make the machines netboot, you can install that way.
I've done that (but not with WBEL4).  You can install via a serial
port, or via a VNC session (added circa RedHat 9, or RHEL3).  Both
of those are command line parameters to anaconda.  You might be able
to use a floppy boot disk to accomplish that.  (You could under
WBEL3, but with WBEL4 being 2.6 based, I thought John said that it
wouldn't fit on a floppy any more).

Googling for "anaconda", "serial", and "VNC" came up with this link:

http://www.cpqlinux.com/anaconda.html

    It's not terribly useful, but it does have the boot options you
can pass to Linux to get it to do VNC and serial installs.  It looks
like you can do a remote X install (never heard of that until this
page).  In order to get the first install working you'll probably
have to install a video card to troubleshoot until you get the boot
image and options just right.  After that, it should be fairly
straightforward to do the unattended headless installs.

    No idea on the NVidia chipset.  Historically Nvidia supports
linux with binary only drives.  It won't release enough information
to the public to develop native drivers.  However, I know the
Ethernet got reverse engineered (forcedeth I believe is the drive
name).  For the RAID, unless you know the chipset is doing real
hardware RAID, it's probably safer and better to use software RAID
under Linux.

    Thanks,
        Kirby

> 
> Thx.
> 
> David Wynter
> 
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