WP: Werner Puschitz J: John WP> I want to create a Kickstart boot floppy disk for our admins WP> where they only have to provide the static IP address of the new WP> server, the IP address of the default gateway, and the name of the WP> server. Everything else should be done/configured automatically. WP> What is the best approach solving this problem? J> Look more closely at DHCP. If you issue long leases it's pretty J> similar to static IP without the administrative overheads. J> If you don't install many systems, you could give them a floppy that J> gets the ks file from your server, and you customise the ks file(s) J> on demand. We do this here with a fair number of systems (~170) -- it's scalable given some infrastructure. We use a standard DHCP kickstart floppy image, which causes the machine to get its ks.cfg from the file server pointed to by the "next-server" DHCP variable (and the "filename" variable), as John mentions. Then we have a separate ks.cfg for every host which uses "network --bootproto static -ip <ip>", to make sure that all the machines use a static address after the reboot. We've written a ks.cfg file generator which handles creating the ks.cfg for each host. All the sysadmin has to do is run the ks.cfg generator for the host, add a record for the host to the DHCP server, and kickstart with the DHCP kickstart floppy. Chris -- cmalek@xxxxxxxxxxx Nosce Teipsum Office: (626) 395-2593 Fax: (626) 792-4257 Mail Stop: 014-81
