We work in a lab environment at Cisco Systems in RTP, North Carolina, and are responsible for the care and feeding of many Intel, Sun, and Cisco boxes that make up the lab environment. Because it’s a lab, developers and testers require frequent re-installations of these systems to return them to a known state. We also need to install operating systems on new boxes fairly often.

All of these installations can be time-consuming, so we were tasked with creating a locally available kickstart server for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1.

As we started to delve into the requirements for creating a kickstart server we discovered that, although much of the information required to do so is available from various places on the Internet, some necessary information is very difficult to find. This article will concentrate on the specific configuration details required for an unattended network Kickstart of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1. It is intended to cover all aspects of setting up a Kickstart server, including some information that is not readily available.

The basic function of a kickstart server is to allow an administrator to perform a network installation of Linux.

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