Kickstarting Linux without a DHCP server
Kickstart is a super useful techology for performing Linux installations. Typically when you type linux ks=XXX from the boot menu:
boot: linux ks=floppy:/ks.cfg
The host will use DHCP to acquire an IP address. If a DHCP server isn’t available on the network you want to perform the kickstart on, you can forego DHCP and assign a static IP address by appending the “ip=,” “netmask=,” “gateway=” and “dns=” options to the kickstart command line:
boot: linux ks=flopp:/ks.cfg ip=192.168.1.10 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.1.1 dns=192.168.1.1
This can come in handy!
Devin on January 13th, 2007
Another nifty trick with kickstart is to combine it with PXE boot.
As I don’t have the media here, I’m doing this from memory.
1) Go into the pxe section of the images directory of the CentOS, Fedora, or Redhat installation media.
2) Take the initrd there, unzip it and mount it via loopback, since it’s just an ext2 image. I think the later ones you’ll have to use cpio , since it’s an archive, not an image.
3) Copy your ks.cfg into the root of that image. unmount it or repack the archive.
4) Move the initrd and kernel into the tfpserver that you use for pxe boots.
5) I use pxelinux to handle everything, but make sure you configure it to pass ks=file:/ks.cfg as an argument to the boot.
6) voila! Everything should work peachy!
Email me if I was a bit vague on some of the steps.
P.S. Your math spam filter check didn’t appear to work so well when I had scripting turned off on this page.