Kickstart installations can be performed using a local CD-ROM, a local
hard drive, or via NFS, FTP or HTTP.
A kickstart file must be placed in one of two locations:
On a boot disk
On a network
Normally a kickstart file is copied to the boot disk, 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.
To perform a diskette-based kickstart installation, the kickstart file
must be named ks.cfg and must be located in the
boot disk's top-level directory. Note that the Red Hat Linux boot disks are in
MS-DOS format, so it is easy to copy the kickstart file under Linux
using the mcopy command:
Alternatively, you can use Windows to copy the file. You can also
mount the MS-DOS boot disk and cp the file
over. Although there's no technological requirement for it, most
diskette-based kickstart installations install Red Hat Linux from a local
CD-ROM.
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 Linux. The BOOTP/DHCP server will provide 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 will attempt an NFS mount of the file's path, and will copy 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's an example of a line from the dhcpd.conf
file for the DHCP server shipped with Red Hat Linux:
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.
name.
If the filename 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 filename the client searches for is:
The <ip-addr>
section of the filename should be replaced with the client's IP
address in dotted decimal notation. For example, the filename for a
computer with an IP address of 10.10.0.1 would be
10.10.0.1-kickstart.
Note that if you don't specify a server name, then the client system
will attempt to use the server that answered the BOOTP/DHCP request as
its NFS server. If you don't specify a path or filename, the client
system will try to mount /kickstart from the
BOOTP/DHCP server, and will try to find the kickstart file using the
same
<ip-addr>-kickstart
filename as described above.
