Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.3.0 - CHANNEL MANAGEMENT, Reference Manual

Page: 117 / 318

Kickstart —
105
7.4.9.1.2. Kickstart Prerequisites
Although Red Hat Network has taken great pains to ease the provisioning of systems, some
preparation is still required for your infrastructure to handle kickstarts. For instance, before creating
kickstart profiles, you may consider:
• A DHCP server is not required for kickstarting, but it can make things easier. If you are using static
IP addresses, you should select static IP while developing your kickstart profile.
• An FTP server can be used in place of hosting the kickstart distribution trees via HTTP.
• If conducting a bare metal kickstart, you should 1)Configure DHCP to assign required networking
parameters and the bootloader program location. 2)Specify within the bootloader configuration file
the kernel to be used and appropriate kernel options.
7.4.9.1.3. Building Bootable Kickstart ISOs
While you can schedule a registered system to be kickstarted to a new operating system and package
profile, it is also useful to be able to kickstart a system that is not registered with RHN, or does not yet
have an operating system installed. One common method of doing this is to create a bootable CD-
ROM that is inserted into the target system. When the system is rebooted, it boots from the CD-ROM,
loads the kickstart configuration from the RHN Servers or your Satellite, and proceeds to install Red
Hat Enterprise Linux according to the kickstart profile you have created.
To do this, copy the contents of
/isolinux
from the first CD-ROM of the target distribution. Then edit
the
isolinux.cfg
file to default to 'ks'. Change the 'ks' section to the following template:
label ks
kernel vmlinuz
append text ks={url} initrd=initrd.img lang= devfs=nomount
ramdisk_size=16438 \
{ksdevice}
IP addressed-based kickstart URLs will look something like this:
http://my.sat.server/kickstart/ks/mode/ip_range
The kickstart distribution selected by the IP range should match the distribution from which you are
building, or errors will occur. {ksdevice} is optional, but looks like:
ksdevice=eth0
It is possible to change the distribution for a kickstart profile within a family, such as Red Hat
Enterprise Linux AS 4 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 4, by specifying the new distribution label. Note
that you cannot move between versions (2.1 to 3) or between updates (U1 to U2).
Next, you may customize
isolinux.cfg
further for your needs, such as by adding multiple kickstart
options, different boot messages, shorter timeout periods, etc.