hoki

Usage

hoki

Description

This is a "hands off" kickstart installer for Red Hat Linux-like systems. I've most recently used it for installing Fedora Core 1 on a roomful of PCs.

By "hands off," I mean: to install a new version of the operating system you don't need to physically touch the machine at all. You just run this script. No floppy insertion, no CD insertion. No magic with PXE/TFTP/DHCP is involved. About the only assumptions (I think) are that the target machine is running some sort of Linux with grub as the boot loader, and that there's some reliable network installation tree out there for the kickstart to use. And the script uses curl to download things from our webserver, so that needs to be installed.

The overall idea is to

1. copy the vmlinuz and initrd files from the installation media the target system's hard disk (in our case, these are downloaded from our server by the script);
2. generate and install a kickstart configuration file into the initrd image;
3. modify the boot loader to boot from this vmlinuz/initrd combination and use the kickstart configuration file;
4. reboot the system and wait.

Notes:

• This isn't a Red Hat-supported method. All I can say is: works great for me, could break horribly for you.
• It's probably necessary to have a network installation tree available beforehand. This isn't hard, and is adequately documented in the Red Hat site. In this particular case, we run a HTTP-based installation from okoboji.unh.edu. If you adapt this script, you'll want to change that of course.
• This particular script does a complete wipe of the system and reinstallation, but this is just a function of the kickstart configuration file. I've also used this method to do a hands-off upgrade, for example.
• In our case, even though we're doing a from-scratch install, we want to maintain the target machine's SSH "identity" and its online login records. So the script saves and restores the target system's ssh host key files and wtmp file. The save is done in the kickstart configuration file's %pre section; the restoration is done in the %post section. This is of course not super reliable. If the power fails during an install, these files would be lost.
• Considerable gymnastics are done in the script to come up with various system parameters: device path for the root partition, networking parameters, etc. There may be better ways to do any or all of these things.
• Our kickstart configuration file also downloads and runs a customization script in the %post section; this does a lot of local stuff: installing missing packages, different login and splash screens, replacing some commands with our own, printer configuration, TeX configuration, etc.

Acknowledgement

This method was inspired by this page.

Source

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Last modified: January 11 2004 12:08 EST