Kickstart setup for different hardware profiles - Help!

[Shabazian, Chip]

Driver disks (if needed) can be loaded from either the boot line, OR
from the kickstart file.  Of course, if you need them for the NIC, then
you are going to have to load them from the boot line.  This can be done
with either a custom boot cd, via pxeboot, or manually entered on the
boot line.
 
You can do a lot in %pre to figure out different machines, drives, etc.
dmidecode is useful to figure out which machine you are on.  Doing this,
you can have one kickstart for all servers.
 
If you are going to pxeboot, you are going to need a dhcp server to
assign the initial address.  You can setup the dhcp server to only
assign addresses to specific machines, and to assign a specific IP
address.  Your kickstart file can then make that IP address static.

________________________________

From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of anthony parackel
Sent: Wednesday, November 01, 2006 1:08 PM
To: kickstart-list at redhat.com
Subject: Kickstart setup for different hardware profiles - Help!


Hi All,
 
Unfortunately, I'm assigned the task of creating a kickstart environment
that contains the following machines:
 
Dell 1850
Dell 1950
Dell 2850
Dell 2950
 
Each system will have RHEL 4 loaded on it.  I'm very new to linux(Junior
SysAdmin) and I
need to come up with a way to overcome the following obstacles.
 
     1.  I need to be able to install specific NIC drivers that aren't
supported
 
     eg. The 2950 won't boot off the network because it doesn't have the
Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit ethernet driver(bnx2)
 
      Should I setup an environment that will load the drivers off a CD?
Or is this even possible with PXE? (Not sure how it works)
      My guess is that I'd have to put 'dd' on a boot line.  Is this
correct?
 
2.    Each machine contains different hard drives(SATA, SCSI and SAS).
What would be the most
 efficient way to load the drivers for these different types of
controllers?  I plan on setting up a NFS source where these drivers can
be loaded using 
 The "-driverdisk" option.  Would this be the best way?
 
3.       Since there are multiple hardware profiles, Is it best to have
different ks.cfg files on a CD or a network share?  I'd want to ideally
assign static Ips
to each server instead of using DHCP. 
 
Honestly, I'm very confused and intimidated by this task.  Can anybody
please point down the right path?
 
ANY advice is appreciated.
 
Thanks in advance,
 

________________________________

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