Kickstart Update #2

Kickstart Update #2

After playing around with the Kickstart servers configuration for a couple of days with the help of the knowledge Tom found, I have been tinkering more with everything. I think I may end up using visuals to try to remember which files define which configuration settings are where, as I am constantly finding myself forced to use "history | grep nano "term"" to find which files I most often change. Or perhaps even a general overview (i.e. PXE boot -> TFTP -> Kickstart... however, I'm still not positive that this is the order in which it boots. It seems to make sense though, since pxelinux0.config seems to load up fairly consistently, which then attempts to pull the memdisk and menu files from the /tftpboot/ folder on the host, but then I noticed something, now that the static IP was set. It complained that the Kickstart file could not perform an NFS mount to access files, which is very strange, as I recall looking over the kickstart configuration options and changing this to HTTP. Or at least we thought we did. After looking at the actuall ks.cfg file again, I noticed the network installation simply points to the public folder that is shared over HTTP, not an actual kickstart file. We have something along the lines of "url --url=http://149.61.33.169/pub" set, but it appears as though this isn't recognized, as the client still says it cannot NFS mount. I will try "ks=<url> Kickstart via HTTP." (Source: https://www.redhat.com/magazine/024oct06/features/kickstart/) The only downside is that article is from 2006. After spending some more time looking into all of this, I decided to look up a newer guide in hopes that it would explain the hierarchy. It seems as though setting the KS file to point to the ISO may work, but I found a guide which tells you to point the link towards the kickstart files location over http. I will try to have it use the full ISO, and keep playing with this, but as slow of a process as this is, I feel as though I am beginning to understand what it's like to work for Systems. I believe I have gained invaluable experience in the CLI in Linux environments in the past couple of weeks. Plus, it looks really cool and now all my friends think I'm a hacker when I use a terminal. I created a file which should have set the PXE server to have a static IP, but I haven't tested this and cannot tell whether or not this is active, as the online guides I used mentioned to simply create a file and fill it with the specifications. This is NORMALLY located at: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.static, but this being a Red Hat derivative, it is em1 (not eth0, use "ip addr show" to determine what the active adapter is. This was taken from the following guide: http://linux-sxs.org/internet_serving/pxeboot.html

On a side note, I have been having the ethernet drop on the main system I have been using somewhat infrequently. Occasionally I will not be able to connect to some sites, and I have tried ruling out:
1)The DHCP/DNS/TFTP/PXE server by disable services
2)Trying to turn off Kickstart server entirely
3)Not using the Linux Mint Station next to me
It seemed when all 3 machines were on, there may have been some network congestion, but it could have just been due to the topology of the lab, which I am unfamiliar with.

It still seems as though some part of this server is missing...

After googling a bit deeper I came across this page: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/6747/

There appear to be several steps this guide mentions which I do not believe the other guides we have come across contained. This guide mentions that while using Kickstart, they could NOT get LVM disks setup, and consequently had to opt to use EXT3 as a filesystem. The RPM's to be installed also need to be defined in the kickstart config, otherwise there isn't really a system to install. The kickstart config URL or HTTP location should only be to the RPM location based on this guide. In order to do this, they recommend mounting the iso to /etc/fstab on the server so that at boot, the ISO's are mounted and should be available for kickstarts. I figured that taking all the files from an already mounted disc and leaving them in a directory should work, but it likely removes the FS formatting os ISO9660. Considering that this guide was unable to use LVM disks and had to go for EXT3, is this something to think on? A quick google search shows that EXT4 can offer up to 25% more throughput in large sequential I/O workoads. EXT3 also has additional H/W limitations such as a max of a 2TB file limit, a finite number of subdirectories that can be used, no indexing, and a smaller inode size. A quick double check on the kickstart config shows that we have it set to put a bootloader on the MBR.