How to serve a Kickstart file over the network without a DHCP server

installkickstartrhel

I want to install CentOS 5.5 on two systems. I have a kickstart file.

I would like to install CentOS on a system using this kickstart file. I'm reading the instructions provided by fedoraproject.org and RedHat.com, but they suggest using a DHCP server. I don't want to set up a DHCP server right now, and I can't have DHCP traffic on this LAN.

How can I make this kickstart available over the network without using DHCP to assign an IP and point to the file I know that it is possible to make the Kickstart file available over HTTP, FTP or NFS. How can I configure the RedHat installer to have an IP address on the network and grab the kickstart file from a remote server?

Best Answer

The dhcp server doesn't actually serve the file. The dhcp server assigns an IP address to a host (pxe client) which lacks an operating system when it boots. In addition to the IP address, the dhcp server can tell the pxe client that it should contact a separate server for a boot loader and then the pxe client downloads the boot loader (usually using tftp) loads it, and the boot loader can be configured to download the actual kickstart file using one several protocols, including http and nfs.

If you don't want to use dhcp, you could always boot the host off of a cdrom, and at the prompt where you usually just type linux to start the attended installation process, you can pass in your kickstart file as a kernel option along with a static networking configuration.

Related Solutions

CentOS Kickstart – Available Commands in the %pre Section of a Kickstart File

The %pre section(s) of your kickstart run inside the installer environment.

Here's a list of helpful commands that are available in the installer environment in RHEL6.5:

Shell utils: arch awk basename bash cat chattr chgrp chmod chown chroot clear clock consoletype cp cut date df dmesg du echo egrep env expr false fgrep find getopt grep head hwclock id kill killall killall5 less ln ls lsattr mkdir mknod mktemp mv pidof ps pwd readlink rm rmdir sed sh shred sleep sort split sync tac tail tee top touch true tty uname uniq wc which xargs
Editors and pagers: less more vi
Hash utilities: md5sum sha1sum sha256sum
Compression and archives: gzip bzip2 cpio dd tar rpm
fsck/mkfs/etc. for ext2 ext3 ext4 xfs btrfs msdos vfat
Other filesystem stuff: mkswap swapon swapoff dmraid dmsetup mdadm mdmon dump restore mt lvm lvs vgs pvs ...
Networking utilities: arp arping curl dhclient dhclient-script ftp ifconfig hostname ip ipcalc mtr nc ping rcp rdate rlogin telnet nslookup ntpdate route rsh rsync ssh ssh-keygen sshd scp sftp wget
Hardware info: biosdevname blkdeactivate blkid blockdev dmidecode lshal lspci lsscsi sginfo smartctl
Disk utilities: eject dump restore hdparm smartctl losetup kpartx parted fdisk sfdisk
Console handling / dialogs: chvt consolehelper openvt whiptail zenity
Logging: logger rsyslogd syslogd
python
And lots more!

If you run a manual install, you can switch to the terminal on VT2 (CtrlAltF2) and poke around to find out everything that's available inside the installer environment. compgen -c | sort -u is an easy way to list every command available, and there's lots of system information to be found in /sys and /proc.

(And yes, the kickstart is re-parsed after the %pre scripts run, so your %pre can edit the kickstart and/or generate new kickstart snippets to use with %include.)

Red Hat 7.4: How to inject kickstart file into USB media for UEFI-only system

There's a simpler approach now that would likely work well with both RHEL/CentOS and Fedora ISOs -- since it's part of the lorax project that RHEL and Fedora uses to build its ISOs in the first place, mkksiso. I've only tested it on Fedora 32 though.

There's a bug I discovered when testing it; if the source ISO is bootable on both UEFI and Macs, the new ISO is only bootable on Macs and on legacy BIOS systems. Fixed in this PR but it's not released yet, but mkksiso is a simple Python script that you can just download separately if the rest of lorax is installed.

Injecting a kickstart is now as simple as:

sudo dnf install lorax
wget -cN https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weldr/lorax/master/src/sbin/mkksiso
chmod +x mkksiso
sudo ./mkksiso -V MyNewVolumeID path/to/kickstart path/to/orig.iso path/to/

see e.g. https://github.com/michel-slm/luks-kickstarts/blob/master/rebuild.sh

Best Answer

Related Solutions

CentOS Kickstart – Available Commands in the %pre Section of a Kickstart File

Red Hat 7.4: How to inject kickstart file into USB media for UEFI-only system

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