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I have been looking for a way to auto provision servers using IPMI. I want to basically have a preconfigured linux O.S. and provision it to servers over the IPMI network. I read on a few software suits that can accomplish this but was wondering if anyone had any experience here.

Tks.

ThatGuy
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1 Answers1

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I think you're looking for automated network installations.

To achieve this your should implement a netinstall server. There are a plenty of resources over the web to do this, and depending on the Linux Distribution you're using there are some specific tools, like mrepo for RHEL based systems and apt-mirror for Debian ones.

But in any case you'll need a PXE server to handle the network boot and extra services to serve files over the network, like TFTP, HTTP or NFS.

To make completely unattended installations you must create answer files according to your distribution, and a local mirror using the tools I've described is a good idea if you're deploying a lot of servers.

Since I don't know which distro you're using here are some references for the bigger ones in the enterprise:

Debian PXE Server: https://wiki.debian.org/PXEBootInstall

CentOS PXE Server: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/PXE

Vinícius Ferrão
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  • I can use any distribution for the C and C. But as far as the distro I will be installing over the network it will range far and wide. Is there a way to implement this using IPMI that you know of or is PXE still the best way to go? – ThatGuy Jun 19 '14 at 17:23
  • I've never heard of IPMI installations, the alternative to PXE that I know is using EFI and iSCSI. But if you master the network boot service you can have a lot of distros coming from a single server, even non Linux systems installed from a Linux server. Hope this clarify your questions. – Vinícius Ferrão Jun 19 '14 at 17:26
  • Cool, well I will give it a shot then. – ThatGuy Jun 19 '14 at 17:39
  • Here's a tease from my netinstall server bootscreen: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fwv0jdbol0ivrqo/Screenshot%202014-06-19%2014.47.35.png – Vinícius Ferrão Jun 19 '14 at 17:48