> As long as I am here, does anyone know of a HOWTO that addresses an ftp
> install of Linux over a LAN? I have a box with a NIC and no CD-ROM drive. I
> would like to do the install from a CD-ROM drive on another machine on the
> LAN. Is there another way to do this? I tried to follow the prompts after I
> inserted the supplemental disk, but got nowhere.
I've done FTP installs several times, but ever since Redhat 5.2 / Mandrake
5.2 the machine that I'd tried it on most recently would hang at "SCSI
Setup" (I have no SCSI devices, it's an older 486 box) on the supplemental
disk. There might be a known reason or perhaps a solution, but I found a
CDROM that I could hook up to it and haven't tried again. I'm assuming
it's an incompatibility or conflict with something on that particular
machine that I'm unaware of.
Generally though, it's quite simple, and much like any other install :)
You need to create a floppy with the supp.img file as well as the boot.img
file, and then boot the machine with the boot floppy. A menu will come up
and ask where to install the software from, and amongst other options, are
ftp and nfs. I've never tried anything other than ftp, but I don't see
it changing anything (I'm thinking I may have seen an SMB mount option
too).
>From there you'll need to configure your NIC soon into the configuration,
and then give it the information to connect to the server (address to
connect to, name and password if required, location of the install tree
for the desired chipset, ie, i386).
All you need to do on one of your other machines is to have the mandrake
CDrom shared via FTP or SMB, and then just access it as above. Other
that the brief bit of configuration for the lan install, all other aspects
are the same. It's fairly speedy, too, especially if you're doing this on
a local LAN and not to an FTP server over the net (unless you have a
speedy net connection aswell :)).
hope that helps
Mike
