Diskless Environments; Start The 15.2. Configuring The Dhcp Server; Tftp Server - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 3 System Administration Manual

Diskless Environments

Some networks require multiple systems with the same configuration. They also require that these
systems be easy to reboot, upgrade, and manage. One solution is to use a diskless environment in
which most of the operating system, which can be read-only, is shared from a central server between
the clients and the individual clients have their own directories on the central server for the rest of the
operating system, which must be read/write. Each time the client boots, it mounts most of the OS from
the NFS server as read-only and another directory as read-write. Each client has its own read-write
directory so that one client can not affect the others.
The following steps are necessary to configure Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run on a diskless client:
1. Install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a system so that the files can be copied to the NFS server.
(Refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Installation Guide for details.) Any software to be used
on the clients must be installed on this system, and the
installed.
2. Create a directory on the NFS server to contain the diskless environment such as
/diskless/i386/RHEL3-AS/
mkdir -p /diskless/i386/RHEL3-AS/
This directory is referred to as the
3. Create a subdirectory of this directory named
mkdir -p /diskless/i386/RHEL3-AS/root/
4. Copy Red Hat Enterprise Linux from the client system to the server using
rsync -a -e ssh installed-system.example.com:/ /diskless/i386/RHEL3-AS/root/
The length of this operation depends on the network connection speed as well as the size of the
file system on the installed system. It may take a while.
5. Start the
tftp
6. Configure the DHCP server as discussed in Section 15.2 Configuring the DHCP Server.
7. Finish creating
Section 15.4 Finish Configuring the Diskless Environment.
8. Configure the diskless clients as discussed in Section 15.5 Adding Hosts.
9. Configure each diskless client to boot via PXE, and boot them.
15.1. Start the
On the DHCP server, verify that the
. If it is not installed, install it via Red Hat Network or the Red Hat Enterprise Linux
tftp-server
CD-ROMs. For more information on installing RPM packages, refer to Part III Package Management.
is an xinetd-based service; start it with the following commands:
tftp
/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 xinetd on
/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 tftp on
This command configures the
them to start at boot time in runlevels 3, 4, and 5.
. For example:
diskless directory
server as discussed in Section 15.1 Start the
the
Server
tftp
tftp-server
and
tftp xinetd
:
root/
diskless environment
package is installed with the command
services to immediately turned on and also configures
Chapter 15.
busybox-anaconda
.
rsync
Server.
tftp
as
package must be
. For example:
discussed in
rpm -q