Setting up an Installation Server
 

Obviously, the first step is to gather all SuSE CDs into a single installation source tree. Start with CD1, which will need some special handling. In the root directory of CD1, you'll see a number of subdirectories. Table 31-1 gives an overview of the structure of SuSE's CD1.
 
 

# cd /usr/local/ftp 
# mkdir -p pub/SuSE-6.1 

# mount /cdrom 
# cd /cdrom 
# cp -v A* C* I* L* R* setup.* ls* /usr/local/ftp/pub/SuSE-6.1 
# cp -av d* setup support suse unsorted /usr/local/ftp/pub/SuSE-6.1 
# cp -v .S.u.S.E-disk-* /usr/local/ftp/pub/SuSE-6.1 
# cd / 
# umount /cdrom 

# mount /cdrom 
# cd /cdrom 
# cp -av suse /usr/local/ftp/pub/SuSE-6.1 
# cp -v .S.u.S.E-disk-* /usr/local/ftp/pub/SuSE-6.1 
# cd / 
# umount /cdrom 

# find /usr/local/ftp/pub/SuSE-6.1 -name TRANS.TBL -exec rm {} \; 

 
When all CDs are copied, you're nearly up and running. In fact, the installation via FTP should already work. If your FTP server is active, simply connect a client machine in your network and select FTP as the installation source (Installation from an FTP site in YaST). For the server name you enter the name or IP number of the machine you copied the CDs to and as server directory you'll use /pub/SuSE-6.1. After you press F10, YaST will check if this is a valid installation source and download a couple of index files for later use. After this is done you can go on and change your configuration by adding or removing packages just as you would if you'd used a CD in the local CD-ROM drive.
 

To install using the NFS as the network protocol, you have to allow you clients to have NFS access to the installation source tree. We saw in chapter 20 how to set up a NFS server. All you have to do is to edit the file /etc/exports and add the directory /usr/local/ftp/pub/SuSE-6.1 to the exported file systems. A line like this will do the trick for all machines in the domain simpsons.com:
 

/usr/local/ftp/pub/SuSE-6.1     *.simpsons.com(ro) 

# /sbin/init.d/nfsserver restart 
Shutting down NFS server                                 done 
Starting NFS server                                      done 

So far, we've seen how to use already installed machines with the fresh installed server as installation source medium. In this section we will start a network based installation from scratch.
 
To do this, boot the new machine using either the SuSE CD1, or the boot floppy shipped with the SuSE distribution. In Linuxrc, enter your settings for language, display, and keyboard and load the modules you need for this machine. Most important at this point is the driver for the network card. Make sure you load the right module for your card.
 
Now go to the installation menu and select Start Installation and then Network (NFS) as source media for the installation. You will be asked if you want to use bootp for automatic configuration. Select No. Now enter the IP address of this machine. The next two questions are about netmask, gateway, and name server. Enter the referring values in the forms. Now Linuxrc asks for the address of the NFS server. This is the address of our installation server. Enter it. The last form asks for the SuSE directory on the server. In our case this is /usr/local/ftp/pub/SuSE-6.1 just like in the example above.
 
Now Linuxrc should mount the directory, load the boot system into the RAM disk and power up YaST. From this point there is now difference between the regular installation from CDs and the network based installation over NFS.