Kickstart installation 

Contents

Kickstart installation

Introduction 

The kickstart installation method provides a way to do automated installations of RedHat Linux and derivatives, while allowing the Anaconda installer to make decision about hardware support and packages dependencies. For documentation see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart.

Using kickstart 

Kickstart is not “used” as such, it is more of a method for installation preparation. It uses a script (ks.cfg) to describes the steps necessary for installing Linux. The script and installation files are then provided through standard services like a CD/DVD, dhcp+tftp or a floppy disk.

RedHat provides a tool system-config-kickstart for setting up a kickstart installation, which handles the creation of the ks.cfg file.

PXE configuration 

Network booting by PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) uses the /tftpboot directory for downloading files by TFTP. In order to boot a machine into a Linux environment, the PXELINUX software is used.

The PXE/TFTP directory /tftpboot is organized with the following subdirectories:

pxelinux.cfg/: Contains PXE default.XXX boot files, as well as soft links corresponding to IP-addresses to be installed by PXE.

CentOS-4.X/ (X=3,4): Contains the two files vmlinuz (kernel) and initrd.img (RAM-disk).

The default.XXX files refer to the actual kickstart files in /u/rpm/kickstart/:

ks-centos-4-clean.cfg
ks-centos-4-preserve-scratch.cfg

One of the options defined by these files are the choice of nfs install, via the nfs exported directory (u/rpm) on intra5:

#Use NFS installation Media
nfs --server=130.225.86.6  --dir=/u/rpm/iso/CentOS-4.4-i386

For a new release a new directory /u/rpm/iso/CentOS-4.X should be added and the ISO files placed in this directory, and the kickstart files should be modified accordingly. The ISO files should be downloaded from a Centos mirror site such as http://mirrors.fysik.dtu.dk/linux/centos/.

PXE boot parameters 

The PXE booting is controlled by a number of parameters in the PXE configuration file, for example:

label CentOS5 clean-i386
      menu label Clean CentOS-5-i386, kickstart
      kernel CentOS-5-i386/vmlinuz
      append load_ramdisk=1 initrd=CentOS-5-i386/initrd.img network ks=nfs:130.225.86.4:/u/rpm/kickstart/ks-centos-5-clean-i386.cfg

Here the append parameters are documented in http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda_Boot_Options. The Kickstart file is controlled by the ks=… parameter which can use several types of resources such as nfs, http or ftp. Please note that for RHEL6/CentOS6 that NFS defaults to NFS version 4, however, the ks= parameter also permits NFS mount options such as:

ks=nfs:nfsvers=3:130.225.86.4:xxx

vmlinuz and initrd.img 

The boot kernel and initial file system used by PXE are the vmlinuz mini-kernel and the initrd initial RAM-disk, respectively. These should be downloaded from a Centos mirror site in the centos/X/os/x86_64/isolinux/ directory (replace X by actual version).

On the intra5 DHCP/PXE server they are placed in /tftpboot/CentOS-X.Y directory for Centos version X.Y.

The PXE boot files in the /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg directory must contain default.XXX files such as default.install-centos-4.4-clean which contain a reference to the new versions of vmlinuz and initrd in /tftpboot/CentOS-X.Y.

dhcpd.conf 

The following entry in /etc/dhcpd.conf enables PXE boot by means of the PXELINUX software:

# TFTP download from intra5:
next-server 130.225.86.6;
# Start up PXELINUX:
filename "pxelinux.bin";

These lines are added to /etc/dhcpd.conf on the DHCP servers.