I have been using RH9 on my main machine, and would like to install it on a couple of older 233MHz pentium boxes that have no CDROM drives but do have 3Com network cards. I have the vsftp daemon running nicely on my main machine, so I tried using the FTP install method on the satelite machine. I wrote out an installation boot diskette and also the diskette of supplementary network drivers from the drvnet.img file in the /images diredctory of the RH9 distribution disk #1. The satelite machine I want to install on is networked to my main machine through my Linksys DSL access point/router.

The FTP install starts out working well. I use 'linux text expert' as the boot options, and load the supplementary network drivers. I ask for an FTP install, and it connects successfully to the ftp server in my main box. I have the RH9 disk #1 in the main box's CDROM drive, and give /mnt/cdrom as the location of the distribution. The installation reads the CD and finds the next stage executable to load, and starts anaconda. I get all the way through specifying hard disk partitions, etc., but then it starts to look for package information. At that point the installation fails, unable to find some 'header file'. Thinking that the FTP session has simply timed out, I have modified vsftpd.conf to have a 1 hour idle session timeout and restarted the vsftpd. I have tried stopping the iptables firewall daemon in suspicion that was closing off some port used by FTP. Any clues?

When I do FTP based installation, I point the installer to a full tree, i.e. a directory which contains the contents of all installation CDs, not just the first CD. In that tree the installer finds all packages.

Well, thanks to this pointer I poked around the installation discs some more, and found it actually (I know, RTFM) spelled out in the README file:

If you are setting up an installation tree for NFS, FTP, or HTTP
installations, you need to copy the RELEASE-NOTES files and all files
from the RedHat directory on discs 1-3. On Linux and Unix systems, the
following process will properly configure the /target/directory on
your server (repeat for each disc):

1) Insert disc
2) mount /mnt/cdrom
3) cp -a /mnt/cdrom/RedHat /target/directory
4) cp /mnt/cdrom/RELEASE-NOTES* /target/directory
5) umount /mnt/cdrom

So I set up a distribution directory with this procedure and all 3 discs. However, the same problem stopped the installation, an inability to read the 'header list'. When I look at the log for vsftpd, it logs where the installation succesfully read the RedHat/base/netstg2.img file. Sitting right next to this file in the base directory are two files hdlist and hdlist2 which are evidently what it is trying to read. I still have no idea why it can't, and it doesn't appear in the ftp log.

i can want configure a VSFTP server , completly
but i have a great poblem, when i want to see me FTP server from another machine , it cant be accessable ...