Tools/Drakpxelinux

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Drakpxelinux -- A deployment wizard

1 Introduction
2 Usage
3 References

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Introduction

drakpxelinux is a wizard to create a PXE server. It allows to easily deploy systems using profiles. Systems can be associated to profiles using their MAC address.

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Usage

drakpxelinux allow to install Linux system thanks to the network. For this you need to boot on the LAN. Here are the different steps :

Your network card have a BIOS that will be launched
Your network card will then try to have an IP adress. This IP adress will be given by a DHCP server
Then your network card will look for a server able to send it the file to boot. This will be done by a TFTP ( Trivial FTP ) server
When this file is downloaded, the control will be passed to it. With drakpxelinux, this file is the "stage 1" of Mandriva installation. The "stage 1" is a little program in text mode. To this program it will be shown where to find the installation media ( in this case Mandriva ISO files )
"stage 1" will be configured to use NFS to access the ISO files
The first ISO will be launch and executed as if it has been boot from a CDROM.

So to use drakpxelinux, you first need to install and setup a DHCP server and a NFS server. Here is a list of the needed packages :

drakwizard
dhcp-server
nfs-utils

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DHCP Server

To configure the DHCP server you can use drakwizard. This wizard will install the dhcp-server package and allow you to configure a DHCP server. Don't forget to activate PXE support !

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NFS Server and share

To configure your NFS server, you have to install the nfs-utils package. Then you should activate the nfs and nfslock service. To add the share that will host the ISO files, you can use draknfs. Don't forget to restart the nfs service !

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Create a profile

Now you can launch drakpxelinux. The first thing to do is to create a profile. A profile allow you to install different versions of MandrivaLinux. This way you can add profile for 2006 PowerPack, 2006 Discovery, Corporate, ...

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Add a new entry

When the profil is defined, you can add PXE entries in the profil. PXE entries are entries where you can specify the kernel and the initrd file to use for the installation.

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Configure the entry

To have an automatic installation, choose an auto_install file. Additionnaly, automatic installations will notify the deployment server when the installation is done, so that it can remember installed systems.