Kickstart setup for different hardware profiles - Help!

[Michael Myers]

anthony parackel wrote:
> Hi All,
> Unfortunately, I’m assigned the task of creating a kickstart environment
<snip>
Welcome to the fun(really!) and pain(sometimes) of Kickstart! One 
caveat: Most of my statements apply to Fedora Core, though I've tried to 
be as general as possible. Particularly, I'm not sure which buildinstall 
process and syntax is required for the current RHEL, as the move to 
yum-based install has changed that a bit. The concepts are the same, though.

> 1. I need to be able to install specific NIC drivers that aren’t supported
> eg. The 2950 won’t boot off the network because it doesn’t have the 
> Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit ethernet driver(bnx2)
> Should I setup an environment that will load the drivers off a CD? Or 
> is this even possible with PXE? (Not sure how it works)
> My guess is that I’d have to put ‘dd’ on a boot line. Is this correct?
If the network drivers are in a newer kernel that's available to you, 
I'd rebuild the install images with the updated kernel, as it's much, 
much easier and more maintainable IMO to keep all of the administration 
in one place. Ideally, the newest update kernel has all of the network 
drivers included. I actually just went through this process with a newer 
Intel E1000 that we received on two different boards from different 
manufacturers that we needed to eval. Luckily, going to the current 
kernel version fixed almost everything at once. Buildinstall is your 
friend, and sometimes your adversary. However, once you tame it, it 
makes things much easier. I'm not sure how painful this process would be 
with a Wi-Fi adapter, but at first glance it looks very painful for 
those with software radios. Otherwise, once you have network, you can 
fix just about anything else from kickstart.
> 2. Each machine contains different hard drives(SATA, SCSI and SAS). 
> What would be the most
> efficient way to load the drivers for these different types of 
> controllers? I plan on setting up a NFS source where these drivers can 
> be loaded using
> The “—driverdisk” option. Would this be the best way?
Once you've got working network, yes, you can grab driver disks. I tend 
to try to avoid hardware that doesn't have drivers available in one 
kernel or another, but I know well that that's not always an option.
> 3. Since there are multiple hardware profiles, Is it best to have 
> different ks.cfg files on a CD or a network share? I’d want to ideally 
> assign static Ips
> to each server instead of using DHCP.
> Honestly, I’m very confused and intimidated by this task. Can anybody 
> please point down the right path?
> ANY advice is appreciated.
> Thanks in advance,
>
One hint that might open up a new path of exploration at least, and 
might fix your problems at best: The kickstart config file, since it's 
just a text file, can pretty easily be generated by a CGI script. This 
makes configuration for multiple hardware versions dead simple once it's 
set up, and even different software builds and %post entries can easily 
be specified.
Typing in the static IP on the boot line can be slow and painful, so you 
might also look into using DHCP to boot, and then specifying the network 
settings in kickstart. There's also the possibility of using DHCP tied 
to the MAC address, but that doesn't look like it solves your issue.
Also - if you do use a CGI script with multiple parameters, single-quote 
the URL, as it looks like Anaconda or one of the other scripts that 
handle the bootparams attempt to expand the ampersands.

-- 
Michael
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