Kickstart

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 08:59:17PM -0400, psema4 wrote:
> I've spent a bunch of this week racing around as if my head'd been lopped off.
> 
> Been looking at how to build RHL-based kiosks and am just about ready
> to build my first "automated" installer using kickstart.  I'll be
> testing with VMware (LinuxWorld swag, woot!) later this evening.  I
> unfortunately need to have at least half a dozen machines loaded up as
> kiosks 3 days ago.
> 
> I suppose this is relatively straight-forward.  If there's anything
> here that'll b0rk the install process I'd sure appreciate hearing
> about it.  Also, any gotchas about using Kickstart?  Anything in
> particular to watch out for?  TIA
> 
> (btw, this project is meant for business kiosks, not public ones you
> might see at a mall or library, so I'm taking short cuts the first
> time through.  There are a couple packages not locked down by this
> ks.cfg snippet - like X handling of ctl-alt-backspace.  I just don't
> have the time to go and find all the trouble spots then how to fix 'em
> from kickstart just yet.  It has been terribly educational though.)

I know when I made an installer for a kiosk a couple of years ago, I
eventually decided that using a normal installer with pre seeded answers
was too much work.  So I installed one kiosk as it should be, tar'd the
filesystem, and made a bootable cd with an initrd that simply
partitioned the HD in a predetermined way and made filesystems on the
partitions and extracted the tar file, then updated the ip settings and
a few other files.  That was it, all done.  Took about 2 minutes from
power on until ready.  No extracting packages or creating databases or
anything, since it was already done.  I simply extracted the contents of
the filesystem.

Turned out to be by far the simplest to maintain too.  Just update one
kiosk as you wanted it updated, and then future installs would have the
new tar of the updated kiosk setup.

For setting up many _different_ systems with varying hardware and such,
a kickstart/preseed method is handy since it can do more taking hardware
into account.  But for identical systems, nothing beats some kind of
disk imaging.

If they are all able to connect to a local network, and net boot,
something like systemimager might be even better.  You could load them
all in parallel once you setup one of them and image it.

athlon:~# apt-cache search systemimager
systemimager-boot-i386-standard - SystemImager boot binaries for i386 client nodes
systemimager-boot-ia64-standard - SystemImager boot binaries for ia64 client nodes
systemimager-client - Utilities for creating an image and upgrading client machines
systemimager-common - Utilities and libraries common to both the server and client
systemimager-doc - Manual and other documentation
systemimager-server - Automate GNU/Linux installs and upgrades over a network
systemimager-server-flamethrowerd - SystemImager boot binaries for i386 client nodes
systemimager-ssh-i386 - SystemImager boot binaries for i386 client nodes
systemimager-ssh-ia64 - SystemImager boot binaries for ia64 client nodes
systeminstaller - Creates Linux distribution images from a set of packages

athlon:~# apt-cache show systemimager-ssh-i386
Package: systemimager-ssh-i386
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 1320
Maintainer: dann frazier <dannf-8fiUuRrzOP0dnm+yROfE0A at public.gmane.org>
Architecture: all
Source: systemimager-ssh
Version: 3.2.3-4
Depends: systemimager-boot-i386-standard (>= 3.2.0), systemimager-boot-i386-standard (<< 3.3.0)
Filename: pool/main/s/systemimager-ssh/systemimager-ssh-i386_3.2.3-4_all.deb
Size: 1281766
MD5sum: 7f04f2970335bd7b635883187e7f3dfe
Description: SystemImager boot binaries for i386 client nodes
 SystemImager is a set of utilities for installing GNU/Linux disk images to
 client machines over the network.  Images are stored in flat
 files on the server, making updates easy.  The rsync protocol is used for
 transfers, making updates efficient.
 .
 This provides an optional ssh component for the image server, which
 adds the ability to do secure, automated installs.

Lennart Sorensen
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