If you’ve ever installed a server, you’ll know how long it can sometimes take, especially if you need to setup software RAID + LVM, and then go through all the packages and deselect what you don’t need. After that you would normally download a few favorite scripts from the net, or do a yum update to tighten the security even more. Well, do this on 10 server, and you know what it’s like. Boring, and time consuming. For me, the country / language / time zone / keyboard layout / etc, doesn’t change. This made me think a bit further, how about an automated Linux installation? I’ve seen this here & there, but never really took it serious. Until now. I need to deploy CentOS based server which will run cPanel, and cPanel mostly installs & managed it’s own software like Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. From the cPanel’s website, I can see that I need a bare minimum installation, and all installations will be the same. And since CentOS is RedHat based, I can use the kickstart file to automate everything.
My goals are as follows:
- Create a kickstart file, with only the needed packages, and a custom partitioning scheme
- If possible, setup different software RAID levels on the server, depending on how many HDD’s is installed in the machine
- Install & configure Xen for vitalization, and possibly setup 1 or 2 dom_U VM’s as well.
- If I manage to automatically setup a dom_U VM, it would be nice to automatically download & install the latest cPanel scripts as well
