I already have a VMware environment and I would like to migrate our very old Asterisk PBX physical box to our VMware environment (ESXi)

should I try the newly released PIAF3 installer over Scientific Linux or CentOS or wait for a previously mentioned VMware appliance to be released very soon? Any ETA on the release?

Could PIAF re-roll and relabel JUST the installer (PIAFconda?) as it too is Open Source, and thereby avoid having to roll-your-own full distro? Tweak the installer in order to point to the kickstart file, bring up networking, and point to the secondary partition on a multi-partition ISO (the second partition would be the unaltered CentOS min install ISO)?

It sounds like all you *really* need is the ability to pass a boot-time kernel argument pointing to the kickstart file. The kickstart configuration could bring up the network interface in conjunction with completing the remainder of the custom install process.

Heck, if a multi-partition image file is doable, might not even need to RYO installer at all. If you can get the ks.cfg file in the root directory of the primary partition, you’re golden.

I see new releases of VMWare images that look very interesting but they are not running this OS I presume so if I update will I be at yet another dead end?

I guess I would love to know before I spend many hours moving everything from my production system so I dont end up having to scrap it all in a few months.

Not to get into an OS war I would not use Centos and RH if I had a choice and will stick with Ubuntu for workstations and servers. They wont be knocked off the top ranking at distrowatch in the next 10 years for many good reasons. I am not so sure about how well the patching issues will be managed with this OS choice but as long as its being managed long term its all good with me.

[WM: Our recommendation in your case would be to hold off for just bit until either our new ISOs are released or at least until the PIAF stand-alone installer is available. With PIAF-Install, you can choose either the base CentOS platform or the base Scientific Linux platform and have a current, updatable PIAF-Green server for many years.]

Just to follow up, the minimal install works flawlessly with our (soon to be released) PIAF-Installer once the network is enabled. Perhaps we can reach a compromise with Red Hat. And perhaps not. 🙂 I would hate to be the lawyer arguing that enabling of a network interface was sufficient to require relabeling and removal of marks and copyrighted artwork especially with all of the GPL2 hurdles that already have been noted.

I assume this would be considered alteration of CentOS (?) since the ISO would obviously fail the checksum after these changes. Not sure however — would this be just using their provided tools to automate an installation via a supported process, not altering any source code or packages? The new ISO would fail checksum check of course, so maybe not.

Unless there is a tool available that would allow the ISO to be wrapped in a separate booter (e.g. just on disk, not bootable) that could utilize the kickstart file and simple reference the ISO file as the repo source, it might not get around the current issue.

* On a side note, I did notice when looking the at the SIG mailing list archives earlier today that there is some chatter regaridng the creation of a VOIP SIG for CentOS. Perhaps this has potential.

http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOSMinimalCD6.5

Even if some work was required to migrate to this methodolody, it should be a fraction of the work needed to maintain a CentOS derivative distro.

Personally, I think NetInstall would be a bad fit as it has the major drawback of a much longer install time due to remote retrieval of all installed packages. However, the ServerInstall ISO is designed as a minimal install for servers which keeps its image size small while still providing most if not all of the CentOS packages that would be needed for the foundation to build PIAF on top of:

The x86_64 6.5 ISO is only 394 MB.
The 32-bit 6.5 ISO is only 324 MB.

http://mirrors.tummy.com/mirrors/CentOS/6.5/isos/x86_64/
http://mirrors.tummy.com/mirrors/CentOS/6.5/isos/i386/

(Centos-$release-$arch-minimal.iso)

Even if a few RPMs are being REMOVED, this could easily be done via kickstart’s %post-install portion, at the same time other package pulls are being performed. Kickstart even supports launching the ncurses-based network configuration process as part of %pre, which would allow the end-user to set up _either_ DHCP or static IP networking at the beginning of the install process if network connectivity is desired for the kickstart process.

End result: use of an unaltered CentOS distro thereby negating the need to roll-your-own?

[WM: Great suggestion. We will have a look. Thanks. The only potential wrinkles that I see are (1) CentOS by default does not enable DHCP on eth0 and (2) there is no ability to embed our own kickstart file (e.g. rc.local) for automatic continuation after reboot and root login.]

Rolling your own distro with your own marks was the correct solution, and definitely the cleanest one, even if it is more labor-intensive.

I was around when CentOS formed (and prior, having run RHL since 4.0 days), and I rolled a C3 on top of what had been a White Box EL 3 install.

In any case, all the best with PIAF3.

[WM: That has been the scuttlebutt for a while. We’ll see what we see.]