So newbie and def apologize for the hast to post here - but I am early in my daunting research on RH and thougth someone may be able to point out previous threads (search's here just revealed that this site has tons of info in it but hard to get the relevant content), or general directions for research.

What am I looking to do is create an automated installation - from HD or CD or USB key - the computer may not have internet connectivity and as much as possible this needs to be fully hands off or scripted.

If connection to the net is critical then we may be forced to resolve that issue.

thanks in advance for your time on this.

that'll be kickstart then. a standard part of redhat for about 6 years i think... no network connection required, just a configuration file saying how you want to the install to go.

So for additional software and packages we would just provide those on the media then so it had everything it needed. Kickstart was what I started looking at today actually so thanks for the quick response.

well automated often relates to high volume, inwhich case a pxe / nfs server is often a good step forward. plug blank machine in to certain subnet, turn it on, walk away.

An additional thought curious how folks get the RPMs or packages close to the machine (I understand that they could run between 4-6 gbs) your installing - will a external USB HD as the store and a USB KEY as the installer work?

yes generally it'd be fine. LAN based methods would be simpler in the long run though.

Thanks guys once again.

One thing I did not mention here is that there are engineers in the field who will be doing this in site sthat this machine is being converted from wintel to RHEL. They dont have net connectivity and although they are only doing one machine at a time so NOT lots of volume they are not OS/Software technical people so we are trying to automate as much as possible.

Any other guidance would be great. We are working with some success so far with Kickstart and USB Key boot up with local USB HD storage for packages.

You could install one the regular way. It will automatically create an anaconda-ks.cfg file in the root directory that can be used as a basis for the ks.cfg file you would use on the other machines. This seems to me the best way to ascertain that everything is configured as you expect, especially when this a new experience.

does this nanaconda file display all rpms with dependencies as well?