Moving Forward...

After doing some further research for the past day or so, I am now faced with one of two choices. I'm either going to need to re-check each configuration file that we have thus far (which have been shoddily cobbled together from mis-matched guides, as per the Linux-industry standard), and make some of the following changes, start on another server, or try to only use the guide I found most recently. I came up with a list of things I would like to try to rule out each service of the server as possible. So far my brainstorming ideas are as follows:

#This edits the DHCP server and should set the ROOT-PATH
#option root-path would clearly need a different path set to your actual root path.
sudo nano /etc/dhcpd/dhcpd.conf &

subclass "allocation-class-2" 1:08:00:2b:a1:11:31 {
  option root-path "samsara:/var/diskless/alphapc";
  filename "/tftpboot/netbsd.alphapc-diskless";
}

#DHCPD Conf. guide - (http://linux.die.net/man/5/dhcpd.conf)

Try this in the DHCPD config. It would set a default root path, but I do not think this is the proper way to go about this.

In the kickstart file, /var/ftp/pub/ks.cfg try changing the network to:

network --onboot no --devce eth0 --bootproto dhcp --noipv6

'em0' may actually be the wrong nomenclature, and I believe that is what I have it set to. Somewhere between RHEL/CENTOS/OL 5 and 7 this has changed to 'em0' or 'eth0' based on the distribution. I'm not sure if this is causing issues, but considering the pxeboot segment completes and some of the files get sent over tftp I doubt it, but it could be the one component preventing everythign else from functioning.

#Kickstart HTTP Install line. ONLY LINK TO DIRECTORY
url --url="http://192.168.1.1/

*kernel=vmlinuz location, no need for file extension

*initrd requires initrd.img with correct path

/etc/httpd/conf.d/pxeboot.conf
#Change these as necessary. Could be affecting the symlinks we have in place from /tftpboot/netboot/ -> /var/www/html/pub/, or not following them, but I believe I have tried to directly point the config files directly towards the KS server. Perhaps this file needs to simply define a directory with the installation media, and it will work from there.

#The changes within the <Directory> tag should make these changes, provided we input the proper IP's and subnets using the proper CIDR notation.

Alias /kickstart /kickstart
<Directory /kickstart>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Allow from 127.0.0.1 192.168.1.0/24
</Directory>

It also turns out that in the menu.c32 in /tfptboot/netboot or /var/www/html/pub/ should have not only an install option with initrd and vmlinuz, but it turns out it also needs to have the ks=ks.cfg location pointed to it following the paths to vmlinuz and initrd.

Last but not least, did we ever enable all of the ports that we needed on this server, or did we simply turn off the firewall? All of the code is beginning to look similar, and I am unsure which machine had forwarded ports, and/or if both had the firewall disabled for the sake of testing. This is probably not the cause of the issue, but it can't hurt to check.

iptables -L #this will list all of the ports that have been edited or opened#

#The ports that would need to be opened if they aren't already. Also, check the firewall-cmd status on the system.

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 69 -j ACCEPT

iptables -I INPUT -p udp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

I have also decided to take another look at a couple of youtube videos to Kickstart servers in RHEL, as well as some basic Chef guides which explain (in fairly good detail) how Chef can be setup. It is still something I am interested in doing, but I believe I will play around with the server by trying some of these diagnoses first. If I cannot make any progress that way, I will attempt to either re-create the server, or re-build parts of it using this guide: http://www.smtps.net/pxe-kickstart.html. Now, I know there are a TON of guides that have been posted in previous blogs, but this MAY BE THE BEST ONE YET! It shows me almost exactly what I need to see, without any extra fluff, it is fairly well-documented, and he even used an NFS Server to do it! That was another small side thing I discovered while researching through all of this: It turns out NFS has about 2-3x the throughput of HTTP and FTP. I came across a forum post (http://wdtvforum.com/main/index.php?topic=5393.0) where the poster wrote a script to calculate the avg-bandwidth after 10 passes of a file. His results were somewhat interesting. The SSH results were fairly dismal, but I wonder if that's the compromise for getting 'secure' shells. This seems encouraging and is also a good reminder that the issues we face here technologically are fairly universal.

The following video is a video about setting up Chef/using Chef in Ubuntu. I believe that this video gave me a much better visual demonstration and explanation of how Chef can be used. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13CqboU0ijI) I feel as though we may be able to see some progress in this upcoming week. I will focus on the Kickstart server primarily until that functions fairly well, at which point, customization can be added, and perhaps even re-configured during the Kickstart to remove some of the need of Chef/Puppet.