Mass RHEL Management (was re: Custom dialog messages)

Christian.Rohrmeier at SCHERING.DE Christian.Rohrmeier at SCHERING.DE
Tue Aug 16 10:28:32 UTC 2005


Hi all,

Yeah, I am wondering about this too. RHEL 2.1 certainly doesn't have Dialog
in it Kickstart environment. Because of this I have implemented a very
lengthy (but rather functional) interactive shell-based installation
script. The whole thing runs in %PRE, such that all user-interaction is
done with right off the bat and the rest of the install runs without any
user input. I would ofcourse love to make this work with Dialog, which is
much nicer than just having echo/read statements. I for example provide
defaults for, but allow changes to

hostname
system description (for MOTD/SSH banner)
IP
Gateway
NM
network line settings
console keyboard layout
timezone
DNS servers (1 -3)
domain name
domain search order
NTP server
SMTP gateway
etc.

All this gets asked interactively in the PRE% script.

The idea is to have one group (that has no admin experience) setup the
servers and hand them over ready to go, to have applications, etc.,
installed by another group (application administrators), and finally a
third group is responsible for running the system (real unix admins).

Anyhow, Dialog is unfortunately definately not part of the standard
Kickstart environment.

You may now ask: Christian, why don't you just make your own boot media?
And indeed it seems that is the way I am forced to go. Forced, because I am
not willingly going in that direction because I have RHEL 2.1, 3, and 4, I
have WS and AS, I have various Update releases, and I have 32bit and 64bit
servers to support. If I have to customize an install CD for all of those,
I'd go insane! (I'm already going insane just dealing with the kickstart
scripts and install trees for all of the above mentioned versions of RHEL.)

So, my idea was: do EVERYTHING in the KS script, and use only standard
boot/install CDs. To save myself work. But the more I do in KS, the more I
notice how much is missing, especially in RHEL 2.1 (the bane of my
existence: RHEL 2.1 KS doesn't do %INCLUDE, which makes it VERY hard to
work with.)

-Christian

PS. I also have to support IDE, SCSI, and Compaq RAID controller-based
systems. So far I have avoided trying to automate the selection of the
installation drive by having the user manually select what drive controller
to be used for the installation (i.e. "cciss/c0d0", "sda", or "hda"). I can
look in "/proc/ide/hdX/media" to see if there is an IDE hard drive, but
finding out which SCSI or (worse still) which CPQ RAID controller has which
disks is eluding me at the moment. If someone has a schell script that I
can stick into %PRE that automates install hard drive selection, that would
make my day.

_________________
Christian Rohrmeier
Schering AG
Corporate IT - Infrastructure and Services
Computer Systems and Operations
System Administration - Research and Development
Tel +49 30 468 15794
Fax +49 30 468 95794


                                                                           
             "Miles, Paul"                                                 
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                                       Re: Custom dialog messages          
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Hi Phil,

There isn't a standard kickstart dialog is there ? I certainly wouldn't
have gone to the effort of statically compiling it if I'd seen it there.

I tried : export TERM=linux but it made no change.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks,

Paul
P.S Sorry for the stupidly long signature, I have no control over it I'm
afraid.

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