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