Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 SP2 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION Installation Manual page 116

• Are the machines on your site of different hardware configuration (for example,
using different devices or using different memory and disk sizes)?
• Do you intend to install across different domains and need to distinguish between
them?
What rule-based autoinstallation does is, basically, generate a custom profile to match
a heterogeneous scenario by merging several profiles into one. Each rule describes one
particular distinctive feature of your setup (such as disk size) and tells AutoYaST which
profile to use when the rule matches. Several rules describing different features of your
setup are combined in an AutoYaST rules.xml file. The rule stack is then processed
and AutoYaST generates the final profile by merging the different profiles matching
the AutoYaST rules into one. To illustrate this procedure, refer to Section 5.2.2, "Ex-
ample Scenario for Rule-Based Autoinstallation" (page 99).
Rule-based AutoYaST offers you great flexibility in planning and executing your SUSE
Linux Enterprise deployment. You can:
• Create rules for matching any of the predefined system attributes in AutoYaST
• Combine multiple system attributes (such as disk size and kernel architecture) into
one rule by using logical operators
• Create custom rules by running shell scripts and passing their output to the Auto-
YaST framework. The number of custom rules is limited to five.
NOTE
For more information about rule creation and usage with AutoYaST, refer to
the package's documentation under /usr/share/doc/packages/
autoyast2/html/index.html, Chapter Rules and Classes.
To prepare for a rule-based AutoYaST mass installation, proceed as follows:
1 Create several AutoYaST profiles that contain the installation details needed for
2 Define rules to match the system attributes of your hardware setup as shown in
98 Installation and Administration
your heterogeneous setup as described in Section 5.1.1, "Creating an AutoYaST
Profile" (page 86).
Section 5.2.2, "Example Scenario for Rule-Based Autoinstallation" (page 99).