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Please don't be too harsh. I'm quite new to the IT world and any advice/solutions would be greatly appreciated.

Problem: I want to deploy Cent OS DHCP servers to different remote sites. This will probably be 4 or 5 different locations. My idea is to setup all the equipment into a mini-cage before-hand.

Is there an automated way to setup DHCP servers with a similar configuration (such as kickstart maybe?)?

Edit: Thanks for the input. The DHCP Server will also act as a PXE Server. It will connect to multiple appliances (12+), download an image through PXE, then download updates through the Internet.

End goal: I want DHCP and PXE to be ready beforehand so all they have to do is plug it in. Rather than doing each server manually (one-by-one).

Jeremy
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  • It generally helps if you tell us what the end goal is. WHY do you want to deploy remote DHCP servers? What problem are the DHCP servers supposed to solve? – Grant Aug 10 '13 at 00:37
  • https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/ – dmourati Aug 10 '13 at 19:55

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This question is really too broad for us to provide a good answer. In general, yes, there are automated ways to set up a DHCP (/web/ftp/minecraft/whatever) server. You've already identified one tool -- Kickstart is a good way to automate the system installation process. It is primarily an install-time tool, which means that once your systems are deployed into the field you'll need to maintain them manually.

Modern configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and others can be used in addition to Kickstart to (a) provide a more formalized description of your system configuration and (b) to aid in maintaining your systems after they have been deployed.

This is an incredibly large problem space; I've only touched on a few possible solutions here and any one of them is going to have some sort of learning curve. You'll want to pick one and spend some time with it, and take advantage of the community behind the tool for help getting up to speed.

larsks
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