Installation of RHEL and clones 

Note: This page is somewhat outdated, but most tasks are still relevant. (OHN, Jan-2023)

Hardware considerations 

UEFI boot with PXE 

See the page https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/ITwiki/PXE_and_UEFI

If the machine’s boot disk is 2 TB or larger, it will have a GUID Partition Table (GPT). BIOS based machines will in this case require an extra biosboot partition, see https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2016-August/160561.html

In the Kickstart installation file you may define an extra first partition:

part biosboot --fstype=biosboot --size=1

However, a better method is using reqpart:

reqpart --add-boot

The reqpart Automatically creates partitions required by your hardware platform. These include a /boot/efi partition for systems with UEFI firmware, a biosboot partition for systems with BIOS firmware and GPT.

The --add-boot creates a separate /boot partition, so you should not specify the /boot partition yourself.

Automatic installation 

Fysik Linux Workstations are installed using Kickstart installation booting from the network with PXE (Preboot Execution Environment). In this way we are able to make an automated and fast setup on different types of hardware.

Warning

Do not try to remember any of these steps, always follow the guide step by step! If your disagree with the guide, change the guide, but do not stray from the path of the guide. Missing a step leads to inconsistency, inconsistency leads to insecurity, insecurity leads to suffering…

Preparation 

The hostname to ip address is controlled on the DNS name server where en entry should be added to the domain in /etc/named/. Please put the entries in numerical order. Do not forget to restart the service:

systemctl restart named

The installation is performed by PXE booting the computer. This means the DHCP server needs to assign a well known ip address to the machine. You can make a copy of a skeleton host entry in the the dhcpd.conf and add the unknown MAC_address to this entry. Please put the entries in alphabetical order. Do not forget to:

systemctl restart dhcpd

Installation procedure 

Boot the machine and watch it load the Anaconda installer from the network, then find something else to do for the next fifteen minutes - to one hour.

You may need to enable booting from the net in the BIOS (on some of our machines you must enable Network Service Boot or similar).

When the installation has finished, the computer will reboot.

Enabling NFS exports 

This host must be able to NFS mount the /home/camp from the servcamd fileserver, and /home/rpm (read-only) from the intra fileserver. You must verify that the hostname is listed in servcamd:/etc/exports and intra:/etc/exports; otherwise add it like the other hostnames and run:

exportfs -a

In addition to standard packages we need the following packages:

yum install sendmail-cf

The following packages cannot be added during installation, they must be installed after the system is up and running:

yum install autofs yum-cron

Add package repositories 

EPEL repository 

You may wish to add the EPEL package repository with extra packages. Install the newest version of epel-release:

CentOS8:

dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

CentOS7:
```
yum install epel-release
```

RHEL7: See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL Install the RPM:

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

You may wish to install some packages from EPEL:

yum install Lmod git-all python34-pip python2-pip

RPM Fusion repository 

Some RPMs are not in CentOS or EPEL, so you can enable the RPM_Fusion repository:

yum install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/el/rpmfusion-free-release-7.noarch.rpm