On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 10:49:37AM +1300, MrKiwi said: > > Walt Reed wrote: > >When building the "replacement" server, it can help to sync / add > >accounts before all the third-party crap goes on. We do it as part of > >the kickstart %post scripts. Kickstart from pxe-boot is awesome - > >especially on HP servers... :-) Once a machine is installed in the rack > >and powered up for the first time, it's online and usable with all the > >packages we need, preconfigured, in about 15 minutes. > > > Walt - Can you show us your scripts? > > I am working on something similar - a way to deploy a server > using kickstart and then a handwritten script to configure > things like postfix, ip, iptables, mysql, apache etc > > I imagine however that all you clever people have already > got this in your toolbox of tricks,. Well, obviously they are customized for our situation, and contain a lot of info about our infrastructure that I am not at liberty to divulge, but I can give you some pointers. Critical to the whole process is setting up DHCP correctly, a tftp server, customizing the files in tftp so that the correct options are set for booting, setting up a local YUM repository, apache to serve the repository and kickstart files, etc. The kickstart script is almost trivial compared to all that. We also use an NFS server for many things. Kickstart, in %post, runs: /sbin/chkconfig to enable and disable all the services we need or don't need Runs ntpdate and hwclock Creates a bunch or directories in /usr/local and other areas, and mountpoints for various NFS / SAN filesystems Adds the mount info to fstab Starts portmapper Mounts a bunch of filesystems Copies a slew of "standard" config files to /etc and elsewhere from the NFS mounted archive Creates a bunch of "stock" users via useradd / groupadd (we also use LDAP.) Runs Yum to install a whole slew of vendor and local packages When a server installs itself, we find it's IP by looking in the dhcp leases file on the dhcp server, then ssh into the machine and run another script that changes the hostname, sets the IP to a static address, and uses the HP client tools to reset the ILO Admin password. (ILO is HP's remote console system - we run all our servers headless.) To remove the need for the graphical ILO license, we nuke the GRUB splash image, and add the option to the install / boot to force text mode. When I setup the kickstart process, I ran it over and over on the same machine until it completed flawlessly - making notes of anything I had to do manually, and then adding back in to the scripts. This can take quite a while, and again is very customized to our particular hardware / network / software set / environment. The redhat manual on setting up kickstart is actually quite good. http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/sysadmin-guide/