Tom: Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into those tools.
Mark: Yes, they are using pxeboot. Right now when they boot up, the pxe config offers two options, 32- and 64bit. Are you suggesting I create multiple entries that one selects based on what the machine is going to be? Is there a way to have this done automatically so I don't have to physically have to do that for each machine, but rather turn the thing on and have it determine what needs to get installed on that particular machine?
Les: I was hoping for some way to have it all automated so if for some reason I'm not in the building, I can instruct someone else to reboot, pick the kickstart option in the pxeboot menu (be it a web, mail, db, or user server) and a few minutes later have a working machine without them needing to do anything else afterwards. Mirroring the data files from backup is a single step that can be done by any monkey, it's the configuration, or the manual selecting of a script to run, something they can easily screw up, that's I want to avoid.
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 9:51 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Tom Grace lists-in@deathbycomputers.co.uk wrote:
On 20/01/2015 16:29, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
So my question is, is there some way do determine via kickstart, what to install on that machine based on some criteria, possibly the IP that's being assigned to it, or MAC address, or something ...
If you just want to use kickstart, it would be pretty simple to serve
these
via HTTP, and have a simple script in PHP or similar that takes the requesting IP and uses it to choose which version of the kickstart to
serve.
I would suggest that the "right way" would be to kickstart all your
machines
the same way, and then use a configuration management tool (like Puppet
or
Chef) to customize them. This approach is likely to be more work, but
also
more maintainable in the long run.
Or, if you just want the packages that a custom kickstart would install, use a basic kickstart to bring it up, then run your own script (from an nfs mount, scp'd over, pasted into a command line or whatever you might find easier than learning puppet). The script just needs to determine the rest of the packages needed for this particular server and 'yum install ....' them.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos