Installation Procedures

Introduction
This page differs from the other Installation Guides in that it is intended to be a focused, sequential procedure. It assumes we have the following:


 * 1) A freshly scrubbed (or about to be scrubbed) admin machine and nodes
 * 2) Cluster-specific configuration files
 * 3) MAC addresses/dhcpd.conf
 * 4) Hostnames/hosts

It answers the question, "How do we install a fully operational cluster system as quickly as possible?". There are several obvious advantages to streamlining and automating our re installation procedure, and so this goal is a focus of this guide.

Back up Data
There may be valuable data in several places on a cluster system. Some of it we expect users to back up, and some of it we will take care of.


 * User directories

Configure external installation server
The quickest way to install a system from scratch is to boot over the network and run Anaconda, the Fedora installer. Contrast this the network booting with SystemImager, which copies flat files from a pre-configured system right onto a disk. We use the first method for the admin node and the golden nodes and the second method for the rest of the nodes.