Hello,

I'm going to be running CentOS 5.1 on a bunch of computers. My question is, what options are available for emergency boot disks?

In the past I've just burned a "Tom's Emergency CD" and taped it inside the case. That's fine when there are only a handful of computers, but I'm looking at about 100 computers that I would need to burn a cd for.

I'm running a Raid 1 configuration, so I'm not concerned about the hdd drives dying, but am more concerned with the OS just getting corrupted. Is there a way to have an "Emergency boot disk" on the hard drive? Is there a way to have it look to the internet (or WAN link) to pull the emergency image?

I would much rather have it stored on the hard drive somewhere vs. having to burn 100 cds.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Jared

You could make a small partition on the drive to install the emergency cd into, but that wouldn't do much good in the event of drive failure.
If the 100 computers are on a network, you should investigate network installation.

As far as corrupt files are concerned, use a journaled filesystem, and make regular backups.