Newbie To Custom Installation ISOs

[ScholarJames]

Good morning,

I hope someone can help me. I've been scouring the internet for about a week now trying to discover the best way of creating a custom server based installation ISO for a web stack I use. I've so far come up with nothing. I'm also quite new to Linux but I know my way around the command line, however what I'm looking to do is make an image of the current installation so it can be easily deployed across multiple servers - without having to write custom installation scripts. I know SLAX has this ability but I don't know if there's any way of doing this in CentOS without having to create Live CD's with custom installation scripts and such. Effectively I'm trying to create a blank slate, with pre-installed software or mirroring the entire filesystem - is this possible?

Kind Regards,
James Washington

[avij]

Most people facing similar needs end up writing an appropriate kickstart script, using the stock CentOS install media.

[ScholarJames]

Hey avij, Thank you for the prompt response.

The problem is we run a rather unusuall and customised stack - currently it takes around 2/more hours to setup a new server due to installing packages and rpm's specific to our stack, it can't really be automated. Is there really no option to make an image of a template installation and using that as the base to install from?

[gerald_clark]

If it can be done by hand, it can be automated in the %post section of the kickstart, or in a firstboot script on the target.
There are also other deployment tools available.