John Hodrien wrote:
| Much easier to just use another linux machine as an NFS server. Make an | NFS | export, just lob the iso images in a directory, and the installer | handles the | rest.
It's true, but I don't like the idea of NFS on my network. I have used it for network boot, but it required no root squash in that scenario and it made me uncomfortable. For network boot I managed to replace it with NBD instead which exports a single "filesystem file" from the server, can do so as an unprivileged user, and is anyway faster. I don't mind having to fiddle with a webserver instead of having NFS.
An NFS server for FC3 installs doesn't need any fancy options though and the export can be done read-only. It also doesn't need any loopback mounting or other extraction of the ISO contents, which makes it a bit easier to set up and to use.
On the other hand, if you do extract (or symlink to) the packages from the loopback-mounted ISO images, and serve them out via HTTP, it takes very little extra effort to set up a local yum repository using those extracted packages, which is very handy if you have a bunch of machines to maintain and occasionally need to install extra packages.
Paul.
