Red Hat NETWORK 4.1.0 Reference Manual page 131

Chapter 6. Red Hat Network Website
6.4.9.1.2. Kickstart Prerequisites
Although Red Hat Network has taken great pains to ease the provisioning of systems, some
preparation is still required for your infrastructure to handle kickstarts. For instance, before
creating kickstart profiles, you may consider:
A DHCP server is not required for kickstarting, but it can make things easier. If you
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are using static IP addresses, you should select static IP while developing your kickstart
profile.
An FTP server can be used in place of hosting the kickstart distribution trees via HTTP.
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If conducting a bare metal kickstart, you should 1)Configure DHCP to assign required
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networking parameters and the bootloader program location. 2)Specify within the boot-
loader configuration file the kernel to be used and appropriate kernel options.
6.4.9.1.3. Building Bootable Kickstart ISOs
While you can schedule a registered system to be kickstarted to a new operating system
and package profile, it is also useful to be able to kickstart a system that is not registered
with RHN, or does not yet have an operating system installed. One common method of
doing this is to create a bootable CD-ROM that is inserted into the target system. When the
system is rebooted, it boots from the CD-ROM, loads the kickstart configuration from the
RHN Servers or your Satellite, and proceeds to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux according
to the kickstart profile you have created.
To do this, copy the contents of
bution. Then edit the
following template:
label ks
kernel vmlinuz
append text ks={url} initrd=initrd.img lang= devfs=nomount ramdisk_size=16438 \
{ksdevice}
IP addressed-based kickstart URLs will look something like this:
http://my.sat.server/kickstart/ks/mode/ip_range
The kickstart distribution selected by the IP range should match the distribution from which
you are building, or errors will occur. {ksdevice} is optional, but looks like:
ksdevice=eth0
It is possible to change the distribution for a kickstart profile within a family, such as Red
Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 4, by specifying the new dis-
/isolinux
file to default to 'ks'. Change the 'ks' section to the
isolinux.cfg
from the first CD-ROM of the target distri-
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