[CLUE-Cert] Installing Redhat 7.0 using FTP

John Kottal jlkottal at americanisp.net
Mon Nov 27 17:36:34 MST 2000


This message is to share my experiences in installing RedHat 7.0 using
the FTP method over an aDSL line.

My test system is a P233 MMX, 128 MB RAM, a 3.5 GB HD, with a 131 MB
swap partition as /hda1 and Slackware 7.1 on a 2.0 GB /hda2 partition. I
planned to overwrite another version of Linux residing on a 1.5 GB /hda3
partition by putting RH on it.

After downloading (on a Windows NT 4.0 system) the network boot image
(bootnet.img) and rawrite from the Red Hat site, I created a network
boot diskette using rawrite, and then used it to boot the test system
into the text installation mode.

After the usual questions about keyboard, language and disk partition to
install to, I was asked to choose an installation method, and chose FTP.
Then I was asked to configure the network. While I have a Cisco 675 that
will function as a DNS server, I choose to configure my system manually
and assigned the IP address, netmask, and DHCP server address. The next
dialog box asked for the FTP site location and the Red Hat directory.
Because the Red Hat site had reached its anonymous user limit, I choose
a mirror at ftp.uselinux.org. The Red Hat directory is supposed to be
the location of the base installation program, and I accordingly entered
/pub/redhat/redhat-7.0/i386/en/RedHat/base. This is where I got in
trouble for a few minutes. I got error messages saying that it could not
find the first of the network image files. After a more careful reading
of the error message, I found that the installation program was
automatically directing me to /RedHat/base and appending this to the
entry I had already made. Once I entered /pub/redhat/redhat-7.0/i386/en
as the directory, the installation proceeded without problem.

Since the purpose of the exercise was to practice a FTP installation, I
took the easy way out and chose "default workstation with Gnome" as the
setup I wanted and then accepted installing all the files for this. The
total size was about 841 MB.

Installation from then on was as exactly as with the CD-ROM, except
slower by a factor of three, taking about 1.5 hours to install.

In conclusion:

Other than the trick of entering the FTP directory location,
installation was not much different than any other text-based Red Hat
installation in the way it was done (outside of being slower). If one
has done a CD-ROM based installation, using this method for installation
would not be difficult.

I would conclude that this is a viable method of installing RedHat (or
possibly updating a previous version) if one has a fast FTP connection
and is too cheap to squander $2 for a CD.   :-)

John Kottal





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