Chapter 4. Obtaining System Installation Media In the case of tftpd-hpa there are two ways the service can be run. It can be started on demand by the system’s inetd daemon, or it can be set up to run as an independent daemon. Which of these methods is used is selected when the package is installed and can be changed by reconfiguring the package. Note: Historically, TFTP servers used /tftpboot as directory to serve images from. However, Ubuntu packages may use other directories to comply with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (http://www.pathname.com/fhs/). For example, tftpd-hpa by default uses /srv/tftp . You may have to adjust the configuration examples in this section accordingly. All in.tftpd alternatives available in Ubuntu should log TFTP requests to the system logs by default. Some of them support a -v argument to increase verbosity. It is recommended to check these log messages in case of boot problems as they are a good starting point for diagnosing the cause of errors. Next, place the TFTP boot image you need, as found in Section 4.2.1, in the tftpd boot image di- rectory. You may have to make a link from that file to the file which tftpd will use for booting a particular client. Unfortunately, the file name is determined by the TFTP client, and there are no strong standards. For unattended installs on multiple computers it’s possible to do fully automatic installations using the Ubuntu Installer itself. The Ubuntu Installer supports automating installs via preconfiguration files. A preconfiguration file can be loaded from the network or from removable media, and used to fill in answers to questions asked during the installation process. Full documentation on preseeding including a working example that you can edit is in Appendix B. The Ubuntu installer supports automating installs using Kickstart files, as designed by Red Hat for use in their Anaconda installer. This method is not as flexible as the preconfiguration file method above, but it requires less knowledge of how the installer works. This section documents only the basics, and differences between Anaconda and the Ubuntu installer. Refer to the Red Hat documentation (http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en- US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/ch-kickstart2.html) for detailed instructions. To generate a Kickstart file, install the system-config-kickstart package and run system-config-kickstart . This offers you a graphical user interface to the various options available. 26 4.4.2. Automatic Installation Using Kickstart 4.4.1. Automatic Installation Using the Ubuntu Installer 4.4. Automatic Installation 4.3.5. Move TFTP Images Into Place