Kickstart Installations
December 9, 2009
This is a small paper on setting up a Kickstart server. I used CentOS in this paper. A quick over view on Kickstart installations can be found here: Kickstart Installation
First configure a NFS server that will store your Kickstart configuration files, and the install ISO’s. This is what my /etc/exports file looks like:
/nfs-shares/CentOS_5.3_i386 *(ro,no_root_squash)
The /kicks/ directory stores the kickstart configuration.
The /nfs-shares/CentOS_5.3_i386 stores the install ISO’s.
This is an example of my ks.cfg file for Kickstart installation, this is a very simple configuration. Many more options can be configured as can be seen here: Kickstart Options
Example ks.cfg stored in /kicks/ks.cfg:
install
nfs –server=nfs-serve.mydomain.com –dir=/nfs-shares/CentOS_5.3_i386
lang en_US.UTF-8
keyboard us
xconfig –startxonboot
network –device eth0 –bootproto dhcp –hostname station.mydomain.com
rootpw –iscrypted $KxSiDWLjnyp10lqty$
firewall –enabled –port=22:tcp
authconfig –enableshadow –enablemd5
selinux –enforcing
timezone –utc America/New_York
bootloader –location=mbr –driveorder=sda –append=”rhgb quiet”
# The following is the partition information you requested
# Note that any partitions you deleted are not expressed
# here so unless you clear all partitions first, this is
# not guaranteed to work
clearpart –all –drives=sda
part /boot –fstype ext3 –size=100 –ondisk=sda
part pv.2 –size=0 –grow –ondisk=sda
volgroup VolGroup00 –pesize=32768 pv.2
logvol swap –fstype swap –name=LogVol01 –vgname=VolGroup00 –size=256 –grow –maxsize=512
logvol / –fstype ext3 –name=LogVol00 –vgname=VolGroup00 –size=1024 –grow
%packages
@development-libs
@editors
@text-internet
@gnome-desktop
@dialup
@core
@base
@ftp-server
@network-server
@base-x
@web-server
@smb-server
@mail-server
@server-cfg
@admin-tools
@development-tools
kexec-tools
bridge-utils
device-mapper-multipath
vnc-server
xorg-x11-server-Xnest
xorg-x11-server-Xvfb
imake
-sysreport
Next I’ll boot the system to be kickstarted with the netinstall.iso for the CentOS 5.3 distro. (CentOS-5.3-i386-netinstall.iso)
Once the system is booted from the netinstall ISO enter the following a the boot prompt to begin the Kickstart installation.
(replace 192.168.4.17 with your NFS server)
Sit back and enjoy the automated installation.
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