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Speed up your Fedora PXE installations by hosting the stage2 installer locally

··152 words·1 min·
Fedora Network Pxe Sysadmin

In my previous post about installing Fedora via PXE, I forgot to mention a big time saver for the installation. A Fedora PXE installation requires a few different things:

  • initial ramdisk (initrd.img)
  • kernel (vmlinuz)
  • installation repository

If you only specify an installation repository, then Anaconda tries to drag down a 214MB squashfs.img file in each installation. You can host this file locally by recreating a portion of a Fedora repo’s structure and dropping two files into it.

Do the following in a directory that can be served up via HTTP:

mkdir -p fedora/releases/19/Fedora/x86_64/os/LiveOS/
cd fedora/releases/19/Fedora/x86_64/os/LiveOS/
wget http://mirror.rackspace.com/fedora/releases/19/Fedora/x86_64/os/LiveOS/squashfs.img
cd ..
wget http://mirror.rackspace.com/fedora/releases/19/Fedora/x86_64/os/.treeinfo

Your files are now ready. Go back to your tftp server and adjust your pxelinux.0/default file:

label linux
  menu label Install Fedora 19 guest
  kernel vmlinuz
  append initrd=initrd.img inst.stage2=http://localwebserver.example.com/fedora/releases/19/Fedora/x86_64/os/ inst.repo=http://mirror.rackspace.com/fedora/releases/19/Fedora/x86_64/os/ ks=http://example.com/kickstart.ks ip=eth0:dhcp

This should speed up your installations by a large amount (unless your internet connection is much faster than mine).