Installation guide

Chapter 1. Kickstart Installations 39

1.5. Where to Put A Kickstart File

A kickstart ﬁle must be placed in one of two locations:

• On a boot disk

• On a network

Normally a kickstart ﬁle is copied to the boot disk, or made available on the network. The

network-based approach is most commonly used, as most kickstart installations tend to be

performed on networked computers.

Let us take a more in-depth look at where the kickstart ﬁle may be placed.

1.5.1. Creating a Kickstart Boot Disk

To perform a diskette-based kickstart installation, the kickstart ﬁle must be named ks.cfg

and must be located in the boot disk’s top-level directory. Note that the Red Hat Linux boot

disks are in MS-DOS format, so it is easy to copy the kickstart ﬁle under Linux using the

mcopy command:

mcopy ks.cfg a:

Alternatively, you can use Windows to copy the ﬁle. You can also mount the MS-DOS boot

disk and cp the ﬁle over.

1.5.2. Making the Kickstart File Available on the Network

Network installations using kickstart are quite common, because system administrators can

easily automate the installation on many networked computers quickly and painlessly.

In general, the approach most commonly used is for the administrator to have both a

BOOTP/DHCP server and an NFS server on the local network. The BOOTP/DHCP server

is used to give the client system its networking information, while the actual ﬁles used

during the installation are served by the NFS server. Often, these two servers run on the

same physical machine, but they are not required to.

To perform a network-based kickstart installation, you must have a BOOTP/DHCP server

on your network, and it must include conﬁguration information for the machine on which

you are attempting to install Red Hat Linux. The BOOTP/DHCP server will provide the

client with its networking information as well as the location of the kickstart ﬁle.

If a kickstart ﬁle is speciﬁed by the BOOTP/DHCP server, the client system will attempt an

NFS mount of the ﬁle’s path, and will copy the speciﬁed ﬁle to the client, using it as the

kickstart ﬁle. The exact settings required vary depending on the BOOTP/DHCP server you

use.

Here is an example of a line from the dhcpd.conf ﬁle for the DHCP server shipped with Red

Hat Linux:

filename "/usr/new-machine/kickstart/";

next-server blarg.redhat.com;

Note that you should replace the value after filename with the name of the kickstart ﬁle (or

the directory in which the kickstart ﬁle resides) and the value after next-server with the

NFS server name.

If the ﬁlename returned by the BOOTP/DHCP server ends with a slash ("/"), then it is in-

terpreted as a path only. In this case, the client system mounts that path using NFS, and

searches for a particular ﬁle. The ﬁlename the client searches for is: