Gilles's blog

Here is a mini howto install a RedHat distro on a machine which does not have a cdrom player, but a nic with etherboot.
In this example, I will detail how I installed a dual cpu Opteron with Etherboot on an eepro 100 from my laptop running Fedora core 3.

1. Get the iso images from RedHat and store them into /home/iso
2. mount the iso images :
   mkdir /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc1 /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc2 /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc3 /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc4
mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro /home/iso/rhel-3-AMD64-disc1.iso /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc1
mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro /home/iso/rhel-3-AMD64-disc2.iso /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc2
mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro /home/iso/rhel-3-AMD64-disc3.iso /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc3
mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro /home/iso/rhel-3-AMD64-disc4.iso /mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc4
3. concatenate the iso images on a ftp server
   mkdir /var/ftp/rhel-3-AMD64
mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc1=ro:/mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc2=ro:/mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc3=ro:/mnt/rhel-3-AMD64-disc4=ro none /var/ftp/rhel-3-AMD64
4. Start the ftp server if necessary
   service vsftpd start
6. create the boot image
   cd /tftpboot
cp /var/ftp/rhel-3-AMD64/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz /var/ftp/rhel-3-AMD64/images/pxeboot/initrd.img .
mknbi-linux --output=kernel.nbi vmlinuz initrd.img
7. update the dhcp server configuration. here is a sample :
   ddns-update-style interim;
subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
    option vendor-encapsulated-options 3c:09:45:74:68:65:72:62:6f:6f:74:ff;
    host rhel {
        hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;
        fixed-address 192.168.0.2;
        filename "kernel.nbi";
    }
}
8. restart the dhcpd server
   service dhcpd restart
9. Boot the target machine, enter the bios and choose to boot on the eepro card
10. The machine is now booting on the image it got from the network
11. Choose a ftp install, choose dhcp, enter the ip adress of the ftp server and the directory

And now it is just like a normal install !