Installation guide

6 Chapter 2. Steps to Get You Started

Note

The directory speciﬁed in the following refers to /location/of/disk/space/. This means it is the

directory up to, but not including, the RedHat/ distribution directory. For example, if you have Red

Hat Enterprise Linux 4 installation ﬁles located in /export/rhel/ on the installation staging server,

/location/of/disk/space/ would be /export/rhel/.

To copy the RedHat/ directory from the installation CD-ROMs to a Linux machine which acts as an

installation staging server, perform the following steps:

• For each binary CD-ROM, execute the following commands:

• mount /mnt/cdrom

• cp -var /mnt/cdrom/RedHat /location/of/disk/space

where /location/of/disk/space/ is a directory you create such as /export/rhel/

• umount /mnt/cdrom/

• Note that the Release Notes are not included in the RedHat directory. Unless they are speciﬁcally

copied over, the Release Notes will not be available during your installation of Red Hat Enterprise

Linux. The Release Notes are formatted in HTML ﬁles located at the root of the disc. Copy the ﬁles

to your installation directory. For example:

cp /mnt/cdrom/RELEASE-NOTES*.html /location/of/disk/space/

The Release Notes are also available online from http://www.redhat.com/docs/.

• Next, make /location/of/disk/space/ available for network installation via NFS, FTP, or

HTTP and verify access from a client system.

• For NFS, export the directory by adding an entry to /etc/exports to export to a speciﬁc system:

/location/of/disk/space client.ip.address(ro,no_root_squash)

To export to all machines (not appropriate for all NFS systems), add:

/location/of/disk/space *(ro,no_root_squash)

Start the NFS daemon (on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine, use /sbin/service nfs

start). If NFS is already running, reload the conﬁguration ﬁle (on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux

system, use /sbin/service nfs reload).

Be sure to test the NFS share following the directions in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux System

Administration Guide.

If the RedHat/ directory does not appear in the NFS shared directory, the wrong path may have

been mounted and/or exported.

• FTP and HTTP installations also support a second type of tree structure. To make it easier to access

the contents of the installation CD-ROMs, mount each CD-ROM or ISO image with the following

mount point on the FTP or HTTP server (where X is the number of the CD-ROM or ISO image):

/location/of/disk/space/discX/

For example:

mount -o loop CD1.iso /location/of/disk/space/disc1/