D-I and Kickstart

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 11:36:46PM -0800, Mike Douglas wrote:
> My school is currently investigating rolling out a Ubuntu lab for the
> students using a combination of getupdates and Kickstart. I've followed
> the hoary-changes list and noticed that Kickstart support was been
> recently added to Hoary. Is there any where that I can get some
> documentation/examples relating to this? 

At the moment, it's in the unhappy state where the source is the best
documentation; I intend to rectify this before the Hoary release. All
the same, the system-config-kickstart package is in Hoary and can
generate working Kickstart files for at least some configurations. You
boot the installer with a "ks=<whatever>" kernel argument, the same as
with Red Hat. "ks=http://<server>/<path>", "ks=ftp://<server>/<path>",
and "ks=nfs:<server>:/<path>" all work and are convenient, although you
can also put the Kickstart file on a CD or a floppy or whatever if you
want.

Things I know of that you should avoid for the time being:

  * Firewalling support. Only 'firewall --disabled' works for now.

  * NFS installation. You can retrieve the Kickstart file over NFS using
    'ks=nfs:<server>:/<path>', but booting with plain 'ks' doesn't work,
    nor does retrieving the base system over nfs.

  * RAID/LVM partitioning isn't handled. There are some other bugs and
    unimplemented bits in partition handling too.

  * No support for non-default authentication methods like NIS, LDAP,
    krb5, Hesiod, or Samba.

  * No support for bootloader passwords.

In general at the moment it's liable to fall over and leave a note in
/var/log/syslog if you try to do something unsupported. I intend to make
this more robust soon.

Bug reports about Kickstart support would definitely be appreciated, the
sooner the better. If there are particular unimplemented features you
really need, I'd like to know about those too so that I can bump them up
my priority list.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]