Installing Fedora 16 with web self service.

My main workhorse station — my ThinkPad x220 — has been on Fedora 16 since before the Beta release. But today since I have a calendar free of meetings, I thought I would move my gigantic workstation to F16 as well. However, the workstation has a gigantic hard disk and contains a partial Fedora mirror. I didn’t want to move all that stuff to another station for purposes of installation, and I wanted to do a faster installation than the network would allow (even with a 10-15 Mbps and a relatively fast local Fedora mirror on the Internet at UVa or Virginia Tech), so I decided to see if I could use its own storage from which to do the installation.

Obviously it was very important for me in this situation to choose a Custom disk layout. I needed to make sure not to inadvertently wipe out the partition where my Fedora mirror material was stored. I carefully selected the appropriate options there.

Then came the hard part — having my station serve its own content to itself. I completed the installation steps up to the package selection. At this point the Anaconda installer only wants to see HTTP/HTTPS or FTP repositories for installation. So what I decided to do was to set up a minimal Apache web server to serve out content already on the hard disk to the installation program. I decided to only do an installation from the base repository for the original release, and then I’d yum update first thing after booting the new installation.

How’d I do that? Using the shell environment Anaconda provides for utility and debugging. If you hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 you can get the virtual console that holds a bash shell. Once there, you can either use rpm2cpio or manual copies to bring in the necessary content, since the installer environment is a highly stripped down Fedora installation. I did it somewhat manually, identifying a couple necessary libraries from apr and apr-util first by running ldd on the httpd binary, then bringing in httpd stuff and testing with the following command line until things worked:

httpd -e debug -X

As a result the package installation took about 3 minutes instead of 45 or more over the Internet connection (and well over an hour if I’d had to move all the mirror data around first).

I wouldn’t recommend this method unless you’re fairly comfortable with running Web servers already. And again, all of this is a highly unusual case where I was putting silly demands on the installer. But hopefully this is a nice illustration of why there’s always another way to skin a cat using Fedora. Or maybe it’s just a “stupid pet trick.” Either way, now that it’s memorialized I may be able to find this info next time I want to try this.

I’ll combine this with the information in a previous post to finish my installation shortly.

Holiday break 2011-2012.

I’m not sure whether anyone still gives out (or even needs) these kinds of notifications, but I thought I would mention the upcoming holiday closing at Red Hat. Every year the company tries to make sure there are at least a few days employees can be gone and not worry about catching up to their co-workers when they come back. So for some time between about December 24 and January 1, the entire company is closed, except for a few essential personnel. (I think those people should definitely get special recognition!) This year, due to the days on which the holidays fall, the closing lasts from December 23 through January 2.

UPDATE: The above failed to mention that “essential” includes our entire awesome support organization, who remain on duty for our customers all the time!

The reason I’m posting about this isn’t to say how nice Red Hat is as a company (even though generally it is), or how much I like vacation time (even though I do). Rather, I wanted to make sure the Fedora community is aware that many Red Hat employees will probably take advantage of the holiday closing to visit family or take vacation to places without Internet access. As a result, some people might not be around as much as usual over the holidays. Personally, I’ll be around somewhat this year, because my family lives fairly close by and I have no long-term vacation scheduled. But I do intend to make some shorter, one-day family trips, so it will certainly be a reduced presence from usual.

My goal is for this advance notice to give you some time to figure out if you have any expectations for before the holidays, or work you want to reschedule for afterward instead, or perhaps you want to accomplish some things when fewer people are going to be distracting you! Whatever your goals, I hope the holiday season will bring you some time for them, and that you’ll enjoy 2012 all the more for it.