By thomas, Thu, 04/02/2009 - 23:39
All the services we have configured up to this point were necessary to allow clients to boot off the network. We now need to work on configuring how the machines will be installed. We will be using kickstart to specify where to find the boot media, which packages to install and which scripts to run after installation has finished.

Kickstart files are plain text files, you can create them using a text editor or the graphical utility system-config-kickstart or even by copying the file from an already installed machine. When you install a machine a record of your installation options is kept in the file anaconda-ks.cfg in root's home directory.

system-config-kickstart offers a nice graphical utility and is a good starting point for your first kickstart file, but I find that I more often rely on editing the file myself. If you wish to use system-config-kickstart, it is in the package of the same name.

There are 4 sections to a kickstart file:

  • commands
  • %packages
  • %pre
  • %post