Normally a kickstart file is copied to the boot diskette, or made
available on the network. The network-based approach is most commonly
used, as most kickstart installations tend to be performed on
networked computers.
Let us take a more in-depth look at where the kickstart
file may be placed.
Diskette-based booting is no longer supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Installations
must use CD-ROM or flash memory products for booting. However,
the kickstart file may still reside on a diskette's top-level
directory, and must be named ks.cfg.
To perform a CD-ROM-based kickstart installation, the kickstart file
must be named ks.cfg and must be located in the
boot CD-ROM's top-level directory. Since a CD-ROM is read-only, the
file must be added to the directory used to create the image that is
written to the CD-ROM. Refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Installation Guide
for instructions on creating boot media; however, before making the
file.iso image file, copy the
ks.cfg kickstart file to the
isolinux/ directory.
To perform a pen-based flash memory kickstart installation, the
kickstart file must be named ks.cfg and must be
located in the flash memory's top-level directory. Create the boot
image first, and then copy the ks.cfg file.
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.
|
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/";
next-server 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:
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.
