RHEL5 Kickstart solution.
 

Hi guys,

I've recently started working on a RHEL kickstart project for my company and wanted to field some ideas with the LQ community. Currently I have 2 perl scripts, one that takes input from a web form and stores all the information for a server that is to be kicked and another that generates the kickstart configuration dynamically based on the hostname as input. I have all that working the way I want at this time and have automated everything via %post install scripts so at this point the only input a user has to supply is the following:

<image_name> ks=http://xx.xx.xx.xx/cgi-bin/new_ks.pl?<hostname>

Eventually we will turn on PXE support on all of our backup VLANs and I will be able to leverage that in conjunction with MAC addresses to fully automate the process, but for right now, we are booting via Avocent virtual media. The goal is to come up with some sort of unified boot iso that only requires the user to enter a hostname, select the OS and then finishes the kick. I've looked into using comboot based menus, but am wondering if anyone out there has done something similar.

I have even considered a boot image that writes a dynamically generated MBR to the disk and reboots, but I have limited time to complete this project. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Arthur.

we are currently looking at about the same solution, but i come across http://wiki.systemimager.org/index.php/Main_Page and are going to test that before i start building something custom.

we are currently using static menus with pxelinux to deploy different OS's

Just a quick update...
 

mastrboy, did you ever get anywhere with systemimager? We have now opted to move to an OpsWear solution for provisioning/patch management for our entire environment, so I have a non-PXE stop-gap in place.

Hope your project worked out,
~Art