New to RH Satellite server and Kickstart

[Michael DeHaan]

Fuchs Andreas wrote:
> Hi
>
> I'm pretty new to RHN Satellite server and Kickstart and have a couple
> of questions.
>
> We have the Satellite server setup with the needed channels and a
> kickstart profile ready for those channels.
> Bare Metall installation is running ok ending with a installed system
> with no hostname (registered as "unknown" in the satellite server) and
> ip from DHCP.
>
> We wonder now:
>
> - How does the server get his Hostname?
> - How do we configure the Networks (there are severals including some
> bonding)?
>
> What's best practice?
>
> - cloning a template kickstart profile for each server and adding the
> values?
> - create pre/post scripts who ask for the information during install?
>   as we like this idea
>   

IMHO, you should be aiming for fully-automated installations whenever 
possible.

Using a templating system, like Cobbler's, you can share one kickstart 
template among various systems, add the system
network information into Cobbler, and cobbler will build out the 
per-system kickstarts for you automatically.

In cobbler, this is as simple as:
cobbler system add --name=foo --mac=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF --ip=192.168.5.5 
--subnet=....
and in the template you can reference things like $ip_address and so on 
automatically
there is also a web interface available for setting this up if you don't 
like the command line.

It can also help you manage your DHCP and PXE configurations if you want 
to do that.

>   - is there some documentation/examples/helper scripts to get a this
> nicely done?
>   
It's kind of spread out, but start here:

http://cobbler.et.redhat.com
https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/

The templating system is described here:

https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/KickstartTemplating (warning, this 
reads a bit scarier than it actually is)

>
> Also:
>
> - is cobbler supporting/integrating with the satellite server
>   

Cobbler plays nicely with Satellite. You can use Cobbler with 
Satellite/RHN very easily if you want to.

All you have to do is call rhnreg_ks (or is it rhn_regks, I forget) in 
%post so that the systems you install get
registered to RHN.