Arch Linux

Sepho

Member

Registered: 2008-10-27

Posts: 14

Install Arch on five clients using ssh?

Hi all,

We are trying to install arch on five machines using ssh for our clusters lessons, using VirtualBox. We have arch installed on a machine called "Master" and from this we are using PXE server to load Arch (core) iso on the clients. PXE runs fine but for our purpose we have some troubles.

First of all, we need to boot arch directly, without "Options screen" (screen where you can choose between Load arch, load another OS, reboot, etc...), we NEED to boot arch without user intervention. Then, we need to run up ssh server automatically (maybe parsing any option on PXE config file). And the last issue is to login on client machine as root.

If we run sshd and allow to connect giving permissions on /etc/hosts.allow file and then try to login on client from Master as root, we can't do this because root has no password but ssh requieres it, this is a problem.

In short, we need at least to solve this problems:

* Load arch image directly, skipping load screen.
* Run sshd on startup and allow access
* Be able to login as root from our "Master" machine

Any idea of that? We are thinking about to make an image of our Master machine and use it to offer with PXE, but I think this is a bad idea because client machines has not partitions and our fstab file will try to mount filesystems and this is a problem.

Thanks for your help, god will be grateful for it and kill no more kittys and sorry for the brick!

Last edited by Sepho (2010-12-02 20:56:27)