anthony parackel wrote:
Hi All,
Unfortunately, I’m assigned the task of creating a kickstart environment
<snip>
Welcome to the fun(really!) and pain(sometimes) of Kickstart! One
caveat: Most of my statements apply to Fedora Core, though I've tried to
be as general as possible. Particularly, I'm not sure which buildinstall
process and syntax is required for the current RHEL, as the move to
yum-based install has changed that a bit. The concepts are the same, though.
1. I need to be able to install specific NIC drivers that aren’t supported
eg. The 2950 won’t boot off the network because it doesn’t have the
Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit ethernet driver(bnx2)
Should I setup an environment that will load the drivers off a CD? Or
is this even possible with PXE? (Not sure how it works)
My guess is that I’d have to put ‘dd’ on a boot line. Is this correct?
If the network drivers are in a newer kernel that's available to you,
I'd rebuild the install images with the updated kernel, as it's much,
much easier and more maintainable IMO to keep all of the administration
in one place. Ideally, the newest update kernel has all of the network
drivers included. I actually just went through this process with a newer
Intel E1000 that we received on two different boards from different
manufacturers that we needed to eval. Luckily, going to the current
kernel version fixed almost everything at once. Buildinstall is your
friend, and sometimes your adversary. However, once you tame it, it
makes things much easier. I'm not sure how painful this process would be
with a Wi-Fi adapter, but at first glance it looks very painful for
those with software radios. Otherwise, once you have network, you can
fix just about anything else from kickstart.
2. Each machine contains different hard drives(SATA, SCSI and SAS).
What would be the most
efficient way to load the drivers for these different types of
controllers? I plan on setting up a NFS source where these drivers can
be loaded using
The “—driverdisk” option. Would this be the best way?
Once you've got working network, yes, you can grab driver disks. I tend
to try to avoid hardware that doesn't have drivers available in one
kernel or another, but I know well that that's not always an option.
3. Since there are multiple hardware profiles, Is it best to have
different ks.cfg files on a CD or a network share? I’d want to ideally
assign static Ips
to each server instead of using DHCP.
Honestly, I’m very confused and intimidated by this task. Can anybody
please point down the right path?
ANY advice is appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
One hint that might open up a new path of exploration at least, and
might fix your problems at best: The kickstart config file, since it's
just a text file, can pretty easily be generated by a CGI script. This
makes configuration for multiple hardware versions dead simple once it's
set up, and even different software builds and %post entries can easily
be specified.
Typing in the static IP on the boot line can be slow and painful, so you
might also look into using DHCP to boot, and then specifying the network
settings in kickstart. There's also the possibility of using DHCP tied
to the MAC address, but that doesn't look like it solves your issue.
Also - if you do use a CGI script with multiple parameters, single-quote
the URL, as it looks like Anaconda or one of the other scripts that
handle the bootparams attempt to expand the ampersands.
--
Michael
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