Kickstart Update

6-16
Yesterday I got a minimal install setup of Oracle Unbreakable Linux 7 on a test computer. From there I (attempted) to use the guide named below (the unixmen one). I was not able to make too much progress, but was able to lay a lot of the groundwork for today by knowing where to find these, as today we spent nearly all day toying with several configuration files to make anything function, as the guide was very generic, over-edited, and unspecific as to our setup.

6-17
Today we worked on configuring the Kickstart server. I had found a guide online (http://www.unixmen.com/install-pxe-server-centos-7/ I recommend avoiding it like the plague) and attempted to follow it, but was not able to make much real progress. Tom was able to configure the IP Addresses, subnets, etc. in the "/etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf" file in order to get it online, as I wasn't able to figure it out. We were able to create a kickstart file from the GUI Oracle Linux install that we have, which although it contains enough settings and options to create a .cfg, it has not yet worked. You can access this (might need a gui, with "system-config-kickstart"). Initially we tried to use TFTP to get the files across the network, but later on noticed the default from the guide was set to NFS, however, none of these services were ever setup on the server (again, that guide was pretty awful). We had to enable http and tftp with
"systemctl start tftp.service " "systemctl enable tftp.service" "systemctl enable httpd.service" "systemctl enable httpd.service". Tom suggested HTTP as its one of the easier to work with protocols, so we then brought up the Apache server. We used a flash drive to copy the ks.cfg generated by this GUI tool and mounted it and copied it to the server. There should also be a /tftpboot/netboot/ directory with both the vmlinuz and initrd.img files that SHOULD begin the PXE boot/install. We are not sure how to get these to take the full .ISO and get it to install that, however. Tom had a nifty idea to symlink a folder offered through HTTP to the /pub/ folder that was being pointed to by kickstart, but that still didn't do it. We can consistently get a PXE boot to occur, and seemingly fail or time out after about 6-10 seconds. It seems as though the network card is not doing too much during this time either, as there is minimal disk or network activity.

6-18
After playing around with the PXElinux config file "/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default" to directly have the file for the "squashfs.img" which should be necessary for a live-os install added to the kickstart config to have it load the file. It appears as though this (and sharing all of the other necessary files in the pub folder brought us to a blue menu screen, but it does not actually install anything. But hey, that's progress!