I have a project which involves installing ROS on a dedicated server hosted somewhere on the Internet.

Our preferred provider will allow custom OS install, but only by way of a bootable USB drive (that is a USB key/stick, not a USB CD-ROM drive).

So, ideally, I'd like to take the x86 ISO and put it onto a USB key so that the server boots off that the same way it would boot from a CD.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no knowledge about bootable USB media and how to make one (assuming that it's possible, of course).

So, questions:

1 - Can I get the ISO image onto a USB key and make it bootable, if so,
1a - How can I do it?
1b - Will ROS install that way?

2 - If (1) isn't possible, then what way would work?

The only other thing I can think of is to boot into Linux and then use Clonezilla or something like it to image the drive, but I'm not even sure that would work!

I know somebody's going to say that I shouldn't be doing this in the first place, but the box will be non-critical and the complete setup will use redundant kit, so I'm not worried about the stability of such a configuration.

Ideas please? Thanks in advance.

did you try netinstall?

yep, just install directly to the usb device on a local box using netinstall (or boot from the CD on the local box), and once installed, ship them the usb drive (flash card, etc).

I've hunted for documentation re Netinstall, but I can't find anything which explains how a flash drive install works...

Does it just set up a bootable flash drive which runs ROS (and if so, how do I then get the installation onto the hard drive?) or does it boot and then install a bootable ROS somewhere (if so, where and is it controllable?)

Cheers,

netinstall is a windows program. you just run it, and pick the drive you want to install onto. ignore the network part - you can do a local install with it. make sure you dont screw up and choose your existing C drive, it will format it : ) so yes, just run netinstall from windows, plug in the usb device, and when you see it in the list just pick it and install routerOS onto it. Then, the first time you plug it into the new router youre ready to go.

ooooooh, so you dont want to run routeros from the usb stick, only for installation to a HDD? thats a little different. i assumed you wanted to actually run from the card and not the HDD. Anyone else got any ideas? You can't just boot with the ISO on a cdrom drive?

Sadly, there is no CDROM drive in these hosted boxes

I could just buy a large USB drive, but that seems like a bit of a waste of money when there's a 160GB disk in the box. Of course, the controller may not be supported by ROS anyway, so maybe USB is the only option.

I had used netinstall to provision RBs, but I didn't realise that it could be used to create a bootable flash drive - netinstall is seriously lacking documentation!

Interesting. I have had a play with netinstall and a USB key now.

The first time I did it, the PC booted off the key, did some sort of install on the key and then rebooted into ROS.

The second time I did it, the PC refuses to boot off the key - it tries to boot and then resets itself ad-infinitum.

Is this the same FAT/MBR problem one sometimes has with Linux which means that you have to null out the whole drive before trying again?

Just my 5cents...
Get them to install Ubuntu, Debian or other Linux dist on the server, then you install VMware Server (free) and install RouterOS on a virtual platform.
The great thing is if you b0rk something up, you can still get a hold of the RouterOS via the teminal...
Or maybe you need more RouterOS', you can just install more on the same machine (if you dont use all the CPU and Ram).
Just getting more for your buck...

Only problem is that you need aleast 2 IP's (1 for the server and 1 for RouterOS).

And if the disk on the server break's you can just restore the RouterOS VM on a new host-machine (from backup) without loosing your license and money.

then you install VMware Server (free) and install RouterOS on a virtual platform.

Yes. The weird thing is that I did try this, except something very strange happened... Let's say that the VM Host had IP address 1.1.1.1 and the ROS virtual machine had 1.1.1.2. With ROS down, the IP 1.1.1.2 was dead (as you would expect). When ROS was brought up, any traffic to 1.1.1.2 never reached ROS and the VM host treated it as though it were traffic to itself (i.e. when I went to http://1.1.1.2/, I got an Apache page served from 1.1.1.1 and not the ROS home page.

The same VMWare box works absolutely fine for the various Windows and Linux VMs running on it.

So it looks like VMWare wasn't correctly bridging the interfaces and/or ROS was doing something weird.

Most strange.

Anyway, I'd rather run ROS on the bare metal as it's one less thing which can go wrong, but nice thought.

Strange... i run it on VMware Server on Windows and Linux and VMware Fusion on Mac with no problems.
Or i have one where RouterOS only 9/10 times pick up the network interface... But after a reboot works fine?
Still need to troubleshoot this

Linux ubuntu 9.04 desktop comes with a usb-creator package that allows one to put an iso onto usb drive for booting.

As for vmware, my first install of RouterOS 4 network didnt work... adapters did show fine, but seemed like wmware didnt bridge the adapters properly, as pings gave no response. Ran vmware-config.pl, and network started working, havent seen any problems since.