Kickstart NFS installations

Jason Nemecek jnemecek at sandisk.com
Tue Jun 13 01:33:31 UTC 2006


Hi List, 

 

I looked through the last 2 years of archives and didn't find anything
covering this.

 

My question(s):

 

Short version:  Are kickstart installations allowed under RHEL4 WS?  NFS
installations under RHEL4 WS?

 

 

 

 

Long version:

 

I'm trying to install RHEL4 on several new Dell Precision 470
workstations via NFS.

 

I set up one of the servers with an NFS globally exported directory
/home/RHEL4/ which contains:

 

RedHat/

   Base/   (hdlists, comps, hdstg2, img files...)

   RPMS/  (all RPMS from all of the RedHat directories on the RHEL4 CDs)

   TRANS.TBL

    Ks.cfg 

 

 

I try to install from this host via NFS after booting off of a boot CD
that I created exactly as described in the RHEL4 manual from redhat.com.


 

I hit <F2> when it boots off of the CD to specify installer boot options
and as the RHEL4 sysadmin-guide states, I try to install with the
following command:

 

linux ks=nfs:cad:/home/RHEL4/ks.cfg

 

I want it to look for the kickstart file on the NFS server "cad" under
/home/RHEL4/ks.cfg  

 

The installer finds the kickstart file and uses it. I initially had a
full ks.cfg file, but have been scaling it back step by step to try and
get it to work. Currently it looks like this:

 

#Generated by Kickstart Configurator

#platform=x86, AMD64, or Intel EM64T

 

#System  language

lang en_US

#Language modules to install

langsupport en_US

#System keyboard

keyboard us

#System mouse

mouse

#Sytem timezone

timezone America/Los_Angeles

#Root password

rootpw --iscrypted blahblahblahpasswordgoeshereblahblah

#Reboot after installation

reboot

#Install OS instead of upgrade

install

#Use NFS installation Media

nfs --server=cad.foo.bar.com  --dir=/home/RHEL4/

#System bootloader configuration

bootloader --location=mbr 

#Clear the Master Boot Record

zerombr yes

 

I used the Kickstart Configurator tool to generate a Kickstart file.
When I boot with this ks.cfg it takes me up to the Disk Druid
configuration. I set up the drives (2x300GB) with 2 RAID1 partitions, 1
ext2 partition (/boot) and swap on each drive. When I finish making the
md0 and md1 devices and click "next" to continue out of Disk Druid I get
the following error message dialog window:

 

"You are trying to install on a machine which isn't supported by this
release of RedHat Linux WS"

 

 

There is a button marked "Exit" which exits the install and reboots if
clicked.

 

 

It's odd to me that if I install off of CDs I can do the same thing
(RAID volumes and all) but if I try to install over NFS, then my machine
isn't supported. I just tried it with automatic partitioning and it did
the same thing. Ditto w/o any RAID or LVM partitions.

 

Is this a restriction of the WS version of RedHat?

 

Are network installs only available with the ES and AS versions? 

 

Are Kickstart installs only available with ES and AS?

 

Is there any method that one could automate 50 workstation installs
using RHEL4 WS ? 

 

 

Thanks for your time spent reading this far. :-)

 

*Jason

 

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