Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5 - VIRTUAL SERVER ADMINISTRATION, Installation Manual

Page: 342 / 388

Chapter 31. Kickstart Installations
324
For example, the following transfers a boot image to the pen drive (
/dev/sda
) using the
dd
command:
dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M
Note
Creation of USB flash memory pen drives for booting is possible, but is heavily dependent
on system hardware BIOS settings. Refer to your hardware manufacturer to see if your
system supports booting to alternate devices.
31.8.2. Making the Kickstart File Available on the Network
Network installations using kickstart are quite common, because system administrators can easily
automate the installation on many networked computers quickly and painlessly. In general, the
approach most commonly used is for the administrator to have both a BOOTP/DHCP server and
an NFS server on the local network. The BOOTP/DHCP server is used to give the client system its
networking information, while the actual files used during the installation are served by the NFS server.
Often, these two servers run on the same physical machine, but they are not required to.
To perform a network-based kickstart installation, you must have a BOOTP/DHCP server on your
network, and it must include configuration information for the machine on which you are attempting
to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The BOOTP/DHCP server provides the client with its networking
information as well as the location of the kickstart file.
If a kickstart file is specified by the BOOTP/DHCP server, the client system attempts an NFS mount of
the file's path, and copies the specified file to the client, using it as the kickstart file. The exact settings
required vary depending on the BOOTP/DHCP server you use.
Here is an example of a line from the
dhcpd.conf
file for the DHCP server:
filename "/usr/new-machine/kickstart/" ; next­server blarg.redhat.com;
Note that you should replace the value after
filename
with the name of the kickstart file (or the
directory in which the kickstart file resides) and the value after
next-server
with the NFS server
name.
If the file name returned by the BOOTP/DHCP server ends with a slash ("/"), then it is interpreted as a
path only. In this case, the client system mounts that path using NFS, and searches for a particular file.
The file name the client searches for is:
<ip-addr> -kickstart
The
<ip-addr>
section of the file name should be replaced with the client's IP address in dotted
decimal notation. For example, the file name for a computer with an IP address of 10.10.0.1 would be
10.10.0.1-kickstart
.
Note that if you do not specify a server name, then the client system attempts to use the server that
answered the BOOTP/DHCP request as its NFS server. If you do not specify a path or file name, the
client system tries to mount
/kickstart
from the BOOTP/DHCP server and tries to find the kickstart
file using the same
<ip-addr> -kickstart
file name as described above.