[fedora-arm] Boot image vs PXE install

[Tomasz Urbański]

Robert,
Thank you for encouraging words. It really helps in the struggle. ;-)

Of course, I fully agree that it is not wise to construct PXE build when
you have one box. However, when you have almost ten of them in the home
lab, and you multiply it by OS annual releases plus periodical maintenance
refreshment cycles it becomes more reasonable to automate the process.
Furthermore there is a question of quality that I'm strongly interested in.
I mean that, when I automate configuration management details (at
installation phase <<with PXE>> and further at operations phase <<with
Puttet/SaltStack>>) I can be sure that there are no accidental differences
and misconfigurations. That's my idea-fix.
(I try to execute this policy in my home lab [mainly Atom and ARM
architecture based] as well as in professional multicore multiblade
environment.)

As far as I'm concerned, the best thing you could do is to publish a series
of blog posts describing your findings and procedure (...even for newbies).

I'm interested in every detail of your way of doing.

Regards
Tomasz


2015-03-09 14:25 GMT+01:00 Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>:

> The thread from Tomasz is interesting.  I was jsut in the mode of thinking
> that armv7 builds would be copy an image to SD and go.
>
> I mean how much time to you save on an PXE build to SD versus xzcat to
> SD?  I might think that for the basic build, xzcat on a host is faster.
> Then you run a script that does what kickstart does.  The only
> consideration I have so far with this is sizing the partitions on the SD
> card.  I would like a larger swap to prepare for when I can hibernate to
> swap and getting the / partition to fill the card.
>
> But then I started working with the partitions on the HDD.  It is a little
> harder to move a HDD between systems than a mSD card, so minimum boot from
> an SD card that then did the kickstart to the HDD (or SSD) makes more sense.
>
> I can pull the F22-arm and repo to my local server; I do that for a number
> of distros every night (rsync changes) and do testing of a local install
> that way.  Of course my repo is on a different subnet than my install
> testing; I would have to put up the PXE boot function, etc.
>
> So, lending a hand on a more Anaconda-style install to HD from a minimal
> SD card is something that I can help with, point me to what I can do to
> help.
>
>
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