Here is my small, crude, little Kickstart configuration and post install script that I have up and running in my lab at home. Don’t expect to find anything too fancy here, as this Kickstart was purposefully built to be small and to the point. Here, the point was to spin up a VM, run through a basic install of CentOS/Redhat Linux,  and install VMware Tools along with a Puppet agent.

Note that this post assumes that you have a working Kickstart server.

First lets take a look at our kickstart file, CentOS-6.6-x86_64-minimal.ks

The section directly below kicks off our kickstart ks file. Here we set our root password (no that’s not my hash) and setup our network interface for DHCP. We do a tiny bit of disk partitioning, and setup very simple LVM. Then we choose our packages. As you can see my package list is not at all fancy, I just want to make sure that I have pretty much every package that might need for a lab VM.

[code language=”bash”]
# Kickstart file for RHEL 6 Minimal
# Small Disk

text
install
url –url=http://10.1.0.106/ks/loop/CentOS-6.6-x86_64-bin-DVD1
lang en_US.UTF-8
keyboard us
network –onboot yes –device eth0 –bootproto dhcp –noipv6
rootpw –iscrypted $6$X/4YYZPN$4Sv.khxXms8N8vRssR/Vl35w/m80FF5P6p7aX0D7EFfD9p734F6tU4kXdcSCoOjPiXLrVxqfKxxxxxxxxxxxq5551
firewall –disabled
authconfig –enableshadow –passalgo=sha512
selinux –permissive
timezone America/New_York

# Disk
bootloader –location=mbr –driveorder=sda –append="crashkernel=auto rhgb"
zerombr
clearpart –all –drives=sda
part pv.1 –grow –size=1
part /boot –fstype=ext4 –size=1024
volgroup VolGroup pv.1
logvol / –fstype=ext4 –name=lv_root –vgname=VolGroup –size=1024 –grow
logvol swap –name=lv_swap –vgname=VolGroup –size=1024

#Network
network –device=eth0 –bootproto=dhcp –nameserver=10.1.0.110

# Package Selection
%packages –nobase –excludedocs
@Base
@core
kernel-headers
wget
perl
sysstat
bind-utils
tcpdump
[/code]

Now let me pause to point out the section below. This is the %pre script that I am using to prompt me for the VM hostname before the install begins. The hostname needs to be set before you install puppet on the VM, otherwise you are going to have to recreate your puppet certificates after you set properly set your hostname post install and reboot.

[code language=”bash”]
%pre –log=/root/ks_pre.log
#change to tty6 to get input
chvt 6
exec </dev/tty6 > /dev/tty6

#Prompt for hostname
echo "What is my hostname?"
read NAME
echo "NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=${NAME}" > network
chvt 1
[/code]

Now we run a simple post install, along with a custom post install script. It is this script that will install Vmware tools and Puppet. Myself, I prefer keeping most of my code out of the actual Kickstart ks file, however you can always jam all your code into it if you like. You will just need to validate your syntax first, as I have not tested my config this way.

[code language=”bash”]
%post –nochroot
# bring in hostname collected from %pre, then source it
cp network /mnt/sysimage/etc/sysconfig/network
. /mnt/sysimage/etc/sysconfig/network
# force hostname change
/mnt/sysimage/bin/hostname $HOSTNAME
#Post Install
%post –log=/root/ks-post.log
cd /root
echo "Getting the post install script – if this takes a long time check network or path"
wget http://10.1.0.106/ks/scripts/centos-6-postinstall.bash
echo "Running the post install script"
/bin/bash centos-6-postinstall.bash
[/code]

Ok, so below is the post install script that I am calling in the section above. After a quick modification of my hosts file, I pull down the Puppet installer from my local Puppet server. Next we install the open source VMware tools packages, after creating the required yum repofile.

 

[code language=”bash”]
#!/bin/bash
#centos-6-postinstall.bash

#Switch to the 6th console and redirect all i/o
exec < /dev/tty6 > /dev/tty6 2> /dev/tty6
chvt 6

# Lets make sure we know who the puppet server is before we get too far
echo "Adding hosts entry for puppet master"
echo "10.1.0.115 puppet puppet.lab.localdomain" >> /etc/hosts

## Update Via Yum – not doing this for now in order to save time
#yum -y update
# Install puppet from local puppet master
echo "Downloading and running Puppet installer"
curl -k https://10.1.0.115:8140/packages/current/install.bash | sudo bash
#Install Open Source VMware Tools
rpm –import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-DSA-KEY.pub
rpm –import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub

echo -e "[vmware-tools]\nname=VMware Tools\nbaseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/5.1latest/rhel6/$HOSTTYPE\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=1" > /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repo

echo "Installing Vmware Tools"
yum -y install vmware-tools-esx-nox

#Minor grub.conf modifications
sed -i ‘s/rhgb quiet//’ /boot/grub/grub.conf
sed -i ‘s/hiddenmenu//’ /boot/grub/grub.conf
sed -i ‘s/timeout=5/timeout=10/’ /boot/grub/grub.conf

#Kick off first puppet run, for some reason I think you might need to do this twice.
sleep 5
echo "Running Puppet for the first time"
puppet agent –test
puppet agent –test

#Tell us we have reached the end
echo "We have reached the end of the post-install script"
[/code]

A couple of additional details to note about the post install script above. I like to modify the grub.conf so that I unhide the menu and increase the time out. I also like to make sure that we disable the Redhat graphical boot screen… I want to make sure its easy to catch any errors or miss-configurations in my kickstarts.