CentOS

hi,
i have been looking a way to create a centos linux appliance ( trixbox , asterisk@home or fusionpbx ). Here is the situation:

I have installed Centos 5.4 and then on top of that i have been installing many softwares over the time ( like pbx system , web console , billing etc.) and now it has come to a quite stable stage. the problem is i have to move this installation to another machine with different hardware. even have to install it on multiple systems. the idea is to create a bootable linux iso of the current machine with all the softwares so i can simply put it in a different machine and make it install and run without much fuss.

i am looking for a way to create a linux appliance from my current installation of centos so i can move it to any other machine and make it run . I was suggested kickstart/custom RPM or Clonezilla could be the options . I was looking for some wiki/guideline to use kickstart in this purpose. does any one know of any?

thankyou in advance. :)

Hi [b]shroukkhan[/b] !

Welcome to the CentOS forum (and to the wonderful world of system administration ;-) ).

Kickstart would be a nice start indeed. You can use kickstart to have servers (or desktops) install unattended and roll out some additional software and configure things like IP address etc. (ie preload them). I personally use kickstart for server and desktop deployment. Kickstart works with an configuration script. You can put the script on a webserver and point kickstart to it whenever you want to preload a server or desktop. Kickstart expects a plain text configuration file. But this doesn't mean you can't use something like Perl and CGI to dynamically generate those scripts. So you could create a base script for all your servers and then some special scripts for specific servers (to install specific software etc.).

In the CentOS documentation is all the information present you need to get started with kickstart: http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.2/Installation_Guide/s1-kickstart2-whatis.html

So kickstart is great for the install phase. But after that the job of kickstart stops. It doesn't update stuff and you can't use it to configure stuff after installation. For that you have tools like yum, spacewalk, puppet, etc. But thats an entirely different story

Clonezilla is more for, wel errr, cloning :-). The only thing it does is copying everything from one PC to another. Be aware that you new server will probably have different hardware then your old one which could cause issues. Therefor I wouldn't recommend it.