Decisions of RedHat on CentOS strongly impacted my choices for the minicluster. First of all on the Linux distribution: the roadmap of CentOS is more than ever at the will of RedHat management … which is IBM now. I prefer to switch to a RHEL compatible but autonomous distribution. Perhaps it is a bet but Rocky Linux seems to be a viable choice. At least it will be for the lifespan of the minicluster.

This choice, as well as the fact that RockPI-X are network bootable only by using iPXE led me to the other one of abandoning “the Foreman” software for provisioning. It was not so hard to decide: The Foreman is a too powerful and complex tool for such a small cluster.

The provisioning solution is then a very proven one:

• Setup of a TFTP server to start a network iPXE OS boot
  • configuration of an HTTP server used to download files of the Rocky Linux distribution as well as configuration files for installation like kisckstart.ks
• Writing KickStart and iPXE installation files
• Launching network installation.

It’s that simple ;-)

Use of iPXE requires USB keys for initial boot and a lot information to handle the tool.

The result is a successful fully automated and unattended installation of Rocky Linux on all nodes of the minicluster. As usual, all technical details are available on the Github repository about the minicluster.