Kickstart Installation using only USB

[Alessandro Pilati]

Hi to all.
I have this situation:

I have some Hp Proliant DL385 servers.
These servers support the boot via USB pendrive and floppy.

I have already installed one of them with RHEL 4.0 Upd 3.

Now I want to install the other servers using only a USB pen drive ( 4Gb ), doing a most possible automatic installation.

I know that I need:
-the boot.img ( present in the 1st RHEL CD )
-the anaconda-ks.cfg for the kickstart
-the installation tree ( /redhat with /base and /RPMS subdirs of all 5 CDs of RHEL 4 ) ( great almost 2.4 GB ).

I want to have all these 3 components on the single USB pen ( that has 4Gb of capacity ).

The problem is:
when I do the following command on the USB pendrive ( dd if=boot.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M ),
the partition created doesn't occupy only the 6.3 Mbytes of the boot.img, but all the entire key.

But I want to create another partition in order to put the installation tree and the ks.cfg file.


How can I do this ?
I read about modify the geometry of the usb pen with fdisk, I've tryied this but seems anyway that after dd I have all USB pen covered by the partition created.

Is there a workaround for this?
Is it possible to do the same on a DVD RW instead of a USB pendrive ?

Thanks in advance.

Alex

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Alex,

I don't think you need to modify the geometry of the USB device. All you need to do is make it bootable.

What I recommend is a little different.

Don't try and fit the DVD or iso images on the USB device. Set them up on another server as an NFS share.

Make the pen device bootable as per RH instructions.

boot

linux askmethod
Choose NFS

you will be prompted for a temporary IP address netmask and gateway. Then asked for the NFS server ip and the path of the iso images.

Like magic, boot and install.

To answer your actual question, if you set up a DVD with all the iso's on it or rpm files and make it bootable, you should be able to install off that.

SEP

[Alessandro Pilati]

Thanks for information SEP,
these are very useful.

But we have the problem that we don't do installations, but other less technical staff does it. So our requirement is to minimize "human action" in installations.

The other problem is that we install in "network closed" environments, and the customers don't want other external servers,so in every place we'll install these DL385, we have difficulties to create an "HTTP/FTP/NFS/Installation tree" server. So
I just think to use a DVD where I have ( for example ) /dev/hda1 ( bootable ) populated with boot.img,
and a /dev/hda2 populated with a ext2 FS with the installation tree and the ks.cfg.

When I boot from DVD, I would put only the following command : linux ks=hd;hda2:/mydir/ks.cfg

And in ks.cfg I put the following option:

install harddrive --partition=hda2 --dir=/insttree_dir


My problems are that when I tryed to use a USB stick pendrive, the boot.img ( /dev/sda1 )occupy all 4 Gb;
and for use a DVD, I don't know how to do ( using cdrecord etc. )


Thanks a lot,
Alex

[Steven E. Protter]

I still suggest the NFS style install.

Do it once, take the kickstart file and put it in the USB device.

That should work.

SEP

[Vitaly Karasik_1 · Accepted solution]

Alex, here are a few articles about creating custom CD/DVD for kickstart install:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6473 Hacking Red Hat Kickstart
http://www.harkness.co.uk/other/RHEL4_custom_dvd.html Creating a custom Red Hat installation DVD
http://256.com/gray/docs/redhat_boot/ Customized RedHat Linux Kickstart Installation Cdrom

Rgds,
Vitaly