[CentOS] Kickstarting several *different* setups

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 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Tom Grace
> <lists-in at 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 at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>
>