I'm not an experienced user of e-smith, this is my first install since the first trial of e-smith, probably 1.5yrs ago or so when a friend passed me a promotional copy he'd grabbed somwhere. At the time, I was making an assessment of several such gateway distributions, including smoothwall, astaro, leaf, and clarkconnect. My top two choices were e-smith and clarkconnect, but at the time, the featureset was similar, and the class of machine I was installing on liked it that clarkconnect isn't as memory, disk, or processor intensive; a P90 with 600MB hard drive, 32MB RAM, no CDROM, and two PCI NICs (actually could hack just one easily) had no trouble keeping up with a T1 line, and provide the rest of the basic small-network services (DHCP, DNS, web, etc.). So I'm posting to the Experienced User Forum anyway.
If you want to install e-smith from a floppy over the network, you don't have a lot of choices, since e-smith only put up their iso for download and not the individual files. There are a few ways to do this yourself on your home network with another Linux box running a DHCP server and either a web server, ftp server, or nfs server with the tree of files from the iso.
I went with ftp. My laptop runs Linux most of the time (though I'm going to be running Windogs for a while to get used to how it functions with e-smith). Here are the steps:
Hardwire the Linux workstation's IP address (for me, 192.168.1.1)
Add the necessary config lines to dhcpd.conf for the network 192.168.1.0/24
Install the RedHat anonymous ftp server RPMs
Start the ftp daemon
Drop the e-smith files into /var/ftp/e-smith
Added a symlink in that dir RedHat->e-smith (not sure if it's necessary, jut being cautious)
Then edit the KS.CFG file on the bootnet.img floppy. I actually did this on a Windows machine because I have no floppy in my laptop, but I get 4+ hours out of my two batteries! Change the URL of the install files to point to
ftp://192.168.1.1/e-smithBoot and follow the instructions on the screen! Note that Clarkconnect will allow you to install over the net from their servers.
I've probably laid mistakes all over, and beware of the security implications of intstalling either the ftp or the anonymous ftp RPMs, you're on your own to discover them! Well worth it, the whole thing took <1 hr (for planning AND machine install!!!).
So, I'm liking e-smith a lot so far, I think it's grown up a lot. It's got most of the most recent features and then some, NT domains, email, a sophisticated way to administer Windogs shares, apparently development will be easy....
John
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