Some notes on writing a Kickstart file for automated CentOS (or any other Redhard Linux variant) Linux installations
I’m busy writing a kickstart file to be used on and automated installation of CentOS Linux on my servers. I basically need a vanilla installation for cPanel, and 90% of the options I choose will always stay the same, like the language / country / time zone / packages / etc. The only things that will change are: hostname / IP address / partitioning scheme (if more than 2 HDD’s, then RAID is to be used)
With the kickstart script I can install a new server in less than 10 minutes, meaning better productivity. This is also ideal for reinstalling / upgrading existing servers with least amount of downtime.
I’m going to take some notes on the setup of the kickstart file, and maybe later one post a more in-depth howto on the kickstart file.
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It’s been a while since I worked on this, and thought I’d chase up on it again.I last left off with the RAID partitioning script, which I couldn’t get working properly. Basically I want the kickstart file to automatically setup different software RAID levels, depending on the amount and type of drives installed. All my attempts failed, but I now found a site that might help. On http://evuraan.blogspot.com/2005/02/auto-finding-your-hard-drives-for.html the user explains a scenario that uses perl to see how many drives are installed, and then partition them as needed. From what I see, it could be possible to setup different RAID levels this way, even if the server has a mixture of IDE, SCSI & SATA HDD’s installed. IDE normally reports are /dev/hdX, and SCSI & SATA as /dev/sdX
