Updated FC5 Network Install

Creating a yum repo for installing FC5, prepatched, via the network, is also fairly simple. And makes a lot of sense for anyone supporting a fedora based environment.

I use novi, a local mirror of the fedora install tree:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/

and a local mirror of the fedora updates:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/5/i386/

Some have suggested that rsync is the proper way to keep these mirrors up to date. Probably true, but it’s easier to simply use wget over your favourite existing mirror. These commands work for me:

# wget --mirror -nH ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os
# wget --mirror -nH ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/5/i386

This will update or create your local mirror, using the same directory
structure as the remote site. This location needs to be available on your local
web server. I do all of this on the filesystem of our intranet server, and
the files are accessible via:
http://intranet.address/pub/fedora/linux/....

You could now perform a network install using your local install tree,
however, you would still have to apply patches after the install.

If you have the filespace I recommend leaving the install tree as is and
creating a separate patched install tree. Copy the current install tree minus the RPMs to a new location:

# rsync --archive --exclude 'Fedora/RPMS/*.rpm' \
/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/ \
/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os.patched

novi will list which packages should be in the patched tree, the following
shell hack will copy the required files to the build tree.

# current=`novi /pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS \
> /pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/5/i386/ \
> | awk '{print $2}'`

# for fn in $current; do
>   cp $fn /pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os.patched/Fedora/RPMS
> done

Then we need to update the repo:

# cd /pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os.patched
# createrepo -g Fedora/base/comps.xml .

All Done! Now when you boot from the install CD or DVD use “linux askmethod”.

Server: Your internal web server
Directory: /pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os.patched/