On 10/29/18 9:40 PM, Danishka Navin wrote:
> Hi Rick,
>
> Thanks for your quick response.
>
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 1:26 AM Rick Stevens <ricks@alldigital.com
> <mailto:ricks@alldigital.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 10/29/18 11:31 AM, Danishka Navin wrote:
>     > Hi,
>     > I have to prepare hundreds of USB sticks which need to either
>     papre as a
>     > liveUSB or make it as a installed system (using the USB as the storage
>     > when installing fedora).
>
>     You can install to a USB stick if you want. Generally, Linux running on
>     any sort of a USB drive is quite slow, so keep that in mind.
>
>
> Yes, I know but this is to avoid misconfiguration of over 1000 servers
> across the country within a small window with less technical people in
> remote areas.

Using this method, they'd have a running system by booting the USB
stick, but it'd be very slow as everything would run off the USB stick.
Also remember that there's a limited number of write cycles you can do
to FLASH drives, which would limit the lifespan of the system.

While it might take a bit more time for you to craft, you might actually
be better off in building a USB stick that has both the installable
image and a kickstart file in it that would do a full, automated install
to their local hard drive. That's what kickstart is intended to do. Once
you have that USB stick (installable image and the kickstart file), you
can duplicate that onto multiple sticks using the image method.

>     You could then clone the USB stick to other USB sticks via "dd" using
>     the raw, block devices. Assuming /dev/sdb is the drive you installed to
>     and /dev/sdc is the intended target:
>
>             dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4k,sync
>
>     You could also make an image of the stick on hard drive using dd:
>
>             dd if=/dev/sdb of=/somefilename.img bs=4k,sync
>
>
> this means once installed ISO in to USB (completion of anaconda and post
> installation) create an .img ?

Once a running system is on the USB stick and is bootable, you'd create
an image (.img). I use .img to differentiate between an ISO and a
running system. An ISO image (.iso) is essentially an image of a CD or
DVD and has a specific format as to file naming limits and the like and
BIOS/UEFI firmware know how to boot an CD/DVD and a .iso file emulates
that.

Using the .img, things would run off the USB stick, with the slow I/O
and potentially limited lifespan issues I mentioned above.

If we're about the kickstart mechanism, you'd create a USB stick that
contains the ISO image of the installable system and your kickstart
file. You'd make an image of that stick, then duplicate it to multiple
sticks.

Send the sticks out, give instructions for the proper way to run the
kickstart (it's not that difficult, just some extra typing they need to
do at the boot prompt), then let the USB stick and kickstart install the
system to their local hard drive. No lifespan issues and fast disk I/O.

As I said, you'll have to craft the kickstart file yourself, but it's
not really that hard. Google "install via kickstart" and you'll see
what's involved.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks@alldigital.com -
- AIM/Skype: therps2        ICQ: 226437340           Yahoo: origrps2 -
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-                       When in doubt, mumble.                       -
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