remote unattended slackware install
 

Hi ppl,

I'm looking for a way to install slackware unattended with pxe boot.
I know you can boot up an install from pxe boot, but can you also install it with predefined setup.

So all I have to do is.
login to a server, on this server I'm now able to click a button for a server I select to install an OS (CentOS, debian, ubuntu, windows)
But now I want slackware aswell.

because slackware is using a different installer than the other distro's I want to know if this is possible, and how

rgd,

Tyrael

Maybe this link from Alien Bob's wiki is helpful: http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/...=slackware:pxe .

I came a little further, but not with your advise.
The page from Alien Bob describes to get started with a remote server where you can easily install multiple slackware servers from.
However you still need to be physically at the server.

the following documents helped me alot more

http://slackbasics.org/html/custom-i...install-script
http://www.mutagenix.org/pxe_kickstart/index.php (written for slackware)

thanks to those 2.

I might write an up to date way on how to do this. and post it here for others to use.

There is a way to make the installer launch a SSH server so that you can login to the machine that is ready to be installed. This is still not an unattended install but at least you do not need to be physically present at the console to start the setup.

For this to happen, the installer must know the answer to a few questions it would usually ask you during boot: (1) the keyboard layout and (2) your network card configuration. If both are known, then the card can be configured with an IP address and a SSH server will be launched in the installer to which you can do a remote login as root (no password).

Then you can remotely start setup (after having run the command ". /etc/profile" - watch the dot - to correctly initialize the environment or else the setup will not be found).

Suppose your keyboard layout is "us", your network interface is called "eth0" and you have a DHCP server in your network. Then, all you need is a "pxelinux.cfg/default" file where the following string is added to the "append" line for your bootkernel:
If instead, you want to use a static IP address of 192.168.0.11/255.255.255.0 (i.e. a netmask of 24 bits) the added string becomes
If you don't want to use udev but want to determine yourself what module to load then this would be the appended string (I also added a default gateway of 192.168.0.254 to the mix):
The generic notation for the kbd= and nic= parameters is:
If your installer uses UDEV (the installer of Slackware 13.0 uses udev by default, earlier versions of Slackware did not have udev in the installer) then the "<driver>" string can be "auto". Without the use of udev, the "<driver>" must be an actual kernel module for your card, like "e1000" in my example above.

Eric