Make sure an installation CD (or any other type of CD) is not in your
hosting partition's drive if you are performing a network-based
installation. Having a CD in the drive may cause unexpected errors.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation media must be available for either a network
installation (via NFS, FTP, or HTTP) or installation via local storage. Use
the following steps if you are performing an NFS, FTP, or HTTP installation.
The NFS, FTP, or HTTP server to be used for installation over the
network must be a separate machine which can provide the complete
RedHat/ directory. Both the
RedHat/base/ and RedHat/RPMS/
directories must be available and populated with all files from all
installation CD-ROMs.
Note
The directory specified in the following refers to
/location/of/disk/space/.
This means it is the directory up to, but not
including, the RedHat/ distribution directory. For
example, if you have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 installation files located in
/export/rhel/ on the installation staging server,
/location/of/disk/space/
would be /export/rhel/.
To copy the RedHat/ directory from the
installation CD-ROMs to a Linux machine which acts as an installation
staging server, perform the following steps:
For each binary CD-ROM, execute the following commands:
mount /mnt/cdrom
cp -var /mnt/cdrom/RedHat
/location/of/disk/space
where
/location/of/disk/space/
is a directory you create such as
/export/rhel/
umount /mnt/cdrom/
Note that the Release Notes are not included in the
RedHat directory. Unless they are specifically
copied over, the Release Notes will not be available during your
installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Release Notes are formatted in HTML files
located at the root of the disc. Copy the files to your installation
directory. For example:
To export to all machines (not appropriate for all NFS systems),
add:
/location/of/disk/space *(ro,no_root_squash)
Start the NFS daemon (on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine, use
/sbin/service nfs start). If NFS is already
running, reload the configuration file (on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, use
/sbin/service nfs reload).
Be sure to test the NFS share following the directions in the
Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Administration Guide.
If the RedHat/ directory does not appear in
the NFS shared directory, the wrong path may have been mounted and/or
exported.
FTP and HTTP installations also support a second type of tree
structure. To make it easier to access the contents of the
installation CD-ROMs, mount each CD-ROM or ISO image with the
following mount point on the FTP or HTTP server (where
X is the number of the CD-ROM or ISO
image):
/location/of/disk/space/discX/
For example:
mount -o loop CD1.iso /location/of/disk/space/disc1/
NFS installations can use ISO (or CD-ROM) images rather than copying
an entire installation tree. After placing the required ISO images (the
binary Red Hat Enterprise Linux CD-ROMs) in a directory, choose to install via NFS. You
will then point the installation program at that directory to perform
the installation.
Verifying that the ISO images are intact before you attempt an
installation will help to avoid problems that are often encountered
during an NFS installation. To verify the ISO images are intact prior
to performing an installation, use an md5sum
program (many md5sum programs are available
for various operating systems). An md5sum
program should be available on the same server as the ISO images.
Note
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation program has the ability
to test the integrity of the installation media. It works with the CD,
DVD, hard drive ISO, and NFS ISO installation methods. Red Hat recommends
that you test all installation media before starting the installation
process, and before reporting any installation-related bugs (many of the
bugs reported are actually due to improperly-burned CDs). To use this
test, type the following command at the boot:
prompt (prepend with elilo for Itanium
systems):
linux mediacheck
Additionally, if a file called updates.img exists
in the directory from which you install, then it will be used for
installation program updates. Refer to the file
install-methods.txt in the
anaconda RPM package for detailed information on the
various ways to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as how to apply the installation
program updates.
Note
You can only have the ISO images for one
release and one variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the directory.
