On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Michael Hannon wrote:

> Troy Dawson wrote:
>
> > Michael Hannon wrote:
> >
> >> Greetings.  We're trying to do a kickstart installation of SL 3.0.1 via
> >> PXE,...
>
> > The only network based kickstart I've had work is via http.  Now granted, I
> > haven't even tried NFS based kickstart, so I don't know if it works or not.
> > But if you are looking for a more graceful way of doing it, and much more
> > flexible, you could always try that.
>
> Hi, Troy.  I can attest with certainty that the NFS-based kickstart has
> worked for us in the past, but I'm certainly not wedded to the idea.  If
> http works better, I'll be happy to use it.  Thanks.
>
>                                         - Mike
> --
> Michael Hannon            mailto:[log in to unmask]
> Dept. of Physics          530.752.4966
> University of California  530.752.4717 FAX
> Davis, CA 95616-8677
>

Greetings!

I use NFS kickstart exclusively.  I usually copy the contents of all the
iso images to a disk on the install server.  The directory tree looks like
this:

/disks/2/SL/301/
    cdrom/
    ks/
    post/

I copy the contents of the iso images into cdrom/.  Mount the iso image on a
loop device and 'cp -a' for the first iso, then just the rpms from the RPMS
directory on the subsequent iso images.  So, cdrom/SL/RPMS now contains all
the rpms.

I prep my kickstarts in ks/.  Usually, I take a look at comps.xml and list
the package groups I want in the %packages directory and additional
individual rpms that I want.  The kickstarts are named for the target
machines, one per machine.

In post/ I prep several bash scripts for configuring the machine after
installation which I call from the %post section.  The first is to yum the
machine from linux21.fnal.gov to bring the installation up-to-date.  Then,
they do things like turn off non-essential services, configure services for
their local environment, such as setting up sendmail.cf to point to our mail
server, rewriting syslog.conf so the machines logs to a centralized logging
machine, etc.

This way I have a record of what I did to install and post configure a
machine.  It also has the advantage that I can recreate the installation
should the machine be replaced due to whatever reasons.

Then, I go to each machine, pop in a CD with boot.iso burned on it, and type

linux ks=nfs:install.phy.anl.gov:/disks/2/SL/301/ks/<name>

where <name> is the name of the kickstart script, and walk to the next
machine, and so.  It works great because I can do several machines
simultaneously and when they are done, they are done!  Installed and post
configured the way I want them.

Hope this helps!

Ken