Kickstart w/ Compaq BootNet & CCISS Drivers

[Don_89]

Greetings,

I have a couple questions with trying to get kickstart and the right driver versions loaded correctly with Advanced Server 2.1 and minimum user intervention..

We successfully did a HTTP kickstart install of Advanced Server 2.1 by booting from Compaq's Bootnet 4.0a disk which loads the correct e100, e1000 or bcm5700 network drivers. The install goes well but once the server is rebooted, the eth0 isn't available. The BCM5700.x.x.rpm package has to be installed before I can get eth0 up. Also, the default CCISS driver that comes with AS 2.1 works fine for most servers but one server had 642 controller which required the latest Compaq driver, the default driver that ships with AS 2.1 didn't see any drives.

My goals are:

1) To have the latest CCISS driver load without specifying a driver disk. Do I need to modify the modules.cgz file on the Compaq boot disk or does the SCSI drivers get loaded somewhere else in the boot process? (stg1.img?)


2) The bootnet disk works fine during the install but once a server is up, there is no eth0 available. Do I need specify a %post install script specifying a RPM package install for each NIC (ie. e1000-5.0.43a-1.src.rpm) or is there an easier way?
(ie..running a 2.4.9-e27 kernel?)

any help or direction would be appreciated

[Stuart Browne · Accepted solution]

*whee!* fun stuff!

1) Yes, I beleive you'll have to customize the modules.cgz file on the boot diskette (it's a gzipped CPIO image).

You will need to pull the correct driver version from a working system, put it into this file.

2) Yes, you'll need to use some %post to install the updated driver RPM's. You'll need to pull them from your server (wget is your friend, or just 'rpm '), and away you go.

The other way, as you're doing a network install, is to modify the list, and have it install from there (see the comps.xml to do it that way).

We do this for building up proxy servers for our customers. We pull about 80mb of RPM's and custom install routines/configurations, and just stick a disk in.. Much fun ;)

[Manuel Wolfshant]

In my case, I have updated the distribution, adding the required packages.

As a sidenote: doesn't e1000-5.0.43a-1.src.rpm specify the _sources_ ? As far as I know, these have to be compiled. If I am right, you should %postinstall rpm -Uvh e1000-5.0.43a-i386.rpm

[Don_89]

thanks for the help!!