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Antonius Bloch
Asked: 2011-05-28 11:15:56 +0800 CST

Install CentOS 5.6 with Cobbler

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I imported centos 5.6 into cobbler and set up all the pxe boot stuff. When I netboot it starts the install, but asks me "What type of media contains the packages to be installed". I'm given a choice of CDROM,HTTP,NFS,etc. I want to install from the mirror of the DVD on the cobbler server.

I think I'm missing some high level concepts here. My goal is to just go through a plain vanilla install at first with all the dialogs, and use the choices I make as a template for a kickstart file. For the first install I basically just want to use cobbler to PXE boot the CentOS DVD. This is what I'm doing now:

mount -o loop centos.iso /mnt    
cobbler import --name=centos5 --arch=x86_64 --path=/mnt

At this point the cd rsyncs to my local drive.

cobbler system add --name=myhost comment="Node" --dns-name=myhost.domain.tld --ip-address=192.168.111.201 --mac-addr=00:05:00:21:00:e0  --profile=centos5-x86_64
cobbler sync

I boot the system to PXE and begin the CentOS install. I choose keyboard & language and then I get the dialog "What type of media contains the packages to be installed?". Choices are 'Local CDROM', 'Hard drive', 'NFS image','FTP','HTTP'.

What do I need to do to get the CentOS install to pull the packages from the cobbler server?

pxe-boot cobbler

2 Answers

  1. I did this with NFS, try this:

    • Install system-config-nfs and system-config-netboot (from yum)
    • Start system-config-nfs and share some directory, lets say /srv/
    • Copy Centos Installer DVD content into /srv/Centos or just mount it there
    • Start system-config-netboot and fill the inputs, in protocol type use NFS for the IP the server's IP where nfs service is running and the directory should be /srv/Centos
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  2. Best Answer

    Probably all you need is to add url --url=$tree to /var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts/default.ks (or your own kickstart file). It will point to mirrored OS repo, see output of cobbler report distros for Kickstart Metadata line.

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