2003.05_Red Hat Kickstart-Multiple Installs.pdf

SYSADMIN

Red Hat Kickstart

Driver Injection

The Kickstart mechanism provides

a convenient way of installing Red

Hat Linux automatically. However,

the drivers on the Kickstart disk may

not always match the hardware you

are using – do not fear as help is at

hand as we guide you through the

utility that once configured will

save you many hours otherwise

spent installing.

BY OLIVER SCHADE

number of computers, you will pro-

bably want to avoid clicking through

the installation menus on each system.

Servers without a keyboard or monitor

also need an alternative approach.

Kickstart [1] is the Red Hat Installer’s

answer to this problem: all you need to

install the complete system across the

wire is a boot disk. Partitioning, packet

selection, X11 configuration and similar

details are stored in a configuration file,

meaning that no admin interaction is

required at any point.

If the boot disk supplied with the

Red Hat does not have a suitable drivers

for the hardware in question, Kickstart

needs access to the additional driver

disks. The disks contain the required

kernel modules, but the admin user has

to insert them manually. Also, the soft-

ware will then require some interaction,

so this mechanism is unsuitable for auto-

matic installations without a keyboard or

a display.

If you still want to use Kickstart, you

can modify your boot disk to reflect your

hardware. To do so, you will need a

development system with an identical

Red Hat Linux version; the computer

hardware is not important in this case.

Our example uses an HP Proliant

Server DL380 GE. The test System has

dual Xeon 2.6 GHz CPUs, 6 Gbytes of

RAM, an additional RAID controller

(four channel, 256 Mbytes of cache

RAM), six U160 hard disks with a capa-

city of 73 Gbytes and two Broadcom

10/100/1000TX network adapters. The

Red Hat 7.3 Kickstart disks recognize

neither the RAID controller nor the

Broadcom NICs.

The boot floppy is formatted with a

FAT filesystem. Lilo uses the parameters

in syslinux.cfg and any options the user

typed at the boot prompt to launch the

vmlinuz kernel. The drivers are all stored

in the image file, initrd.img . The floppy

also provides *.msg help texts that the

installer can display if needed. These are

ASCII files with Escape sequences that

define the color scheme. The structure of

the Kickstart disk is shown in Listing 1.

Extracting Drivers

The /mnt/cdrom/images/bootnet.img

directory on the Red Hat CD contains a

May 2003

www.linux-magazine.com

New Drivers for Kickstart Disks

I f you need to install Linux on a large

Red Hat Kickstart

SYSADMIN

Listing 1: Structure of the

Kickstart disk

The kernel modules are stored in

a cpio archive. The default drivers

are stored in the modules subdirectory.

You will find the kernel modules in a

compressed cpio archive called modules.

cgz . pcitable assigns suitable drivers to

PCI ID numbers, and the modules.dep

and module-info describe the module

dependencies and types.

The next step is to extract the drivers

from the archive and replace unwanted

types with self-compiled or manufac-

turer supplied modules. The following

syntax extracts the drivers and creates a

new directory:

not need; we can use rm to remove

them:

/mnt/floppy

|-- boot.msg

|-- general.msg

|-- initrd.img

|-- ldlinux.sys

|-- param.msg

|-- rescue.msg

|-- snake.msg

|-- syslinux.cfg

`-- vmlinuz

cd 2.4.18-3BOOT

rm -f 3c59x.o 8139too.o 8390.o U

tulip.o eepro100.o mii.o U

ne2k-pci.o pcnet32.o

Listing 3: Initrd structure

/mnt/loop1

|-- bin -> sbin

|-- dev

| |-- agpgart

| |-- console

| [...]

| |-- ttyS3

| |-- ttyp0

| `-- zero

|-- etc

| |-- fonts.cgz

| |-- keymaps.gz

| |-- kon.cfg

| |-- lang-table

| |-- loader.tr

| |-- minikon.fnt

| |-- mtab -> /proc/mounts

| |-- passwd

| |-- ramfs.img

| `-- terminfo

| |-- k

| | `-- kon

| `-- l

| `-- linux

|-- linuxrc -> /sbin/init

|-- lost+found

|-- modules

| |-- module-info

| |-- modules.cgz

| |-- modules.dep

| `-- pcitable

|-- proc

|-- sbin

| |-- continue -> loader

| |-- init

| |-- insmod -> loader

| |-- loader

| |-- modprobe -> loader

| |-- rmmod -> loader

| `-- sh -> /usr/bin/sh

|-- tmp

`-- var

`-- state

`-- xkb -> /tmp

disk image. To change the content of the

image file, you first need to make a copy:

/tmp/bootnet.img . A loopback mount as

/mnt /loop0 will allow access to the

filesystem:

gunzip -c /mnt/loop1/modules/ U

modules.cgz > /tmp/modules.cpio

cd /tmp

cpio -idv < modules.cpio

mkdir /mnt/loop0

mount -o loop /tmp/bootnet.img U

/mnt/loop0

The name depends on the Red Hat

version you are using and reflects the

kernel version for the boot kernel on

the installation disk. The directory for

Red Hat 7.3 is called 2.4.18-3BOOT , and

contains the following drivers:

• 3c59x.o

•8139too.o

• 8390.o

• eepro100.o

• lockd.o

• mii.o

• vne2k-pci.o

• nfs.o

• vpcnet32.o

•scsi_mod.o

• vsunrpc.o

• tulip.o

• usb-storage.o

Any drivers you do not need can simply

be deleted. There are several modules

that our Proliant Server DL380 G3 does

Lilo loads the initrd.img file before load-

ing the ( vmlinuz ) kernel, thus providing

an initial RAM disk with drivers, binaries

and device files for the kernel. Initrd is

Gzip compressed and contains an Ext-2

filesystem. Perform the following steps

to access the content:

cp /mnt/loop0/initrd.img U

/tmp/initrd.ext2.gz

gunzip /tmp/initrd.ext2.gz

mkdir /mnt/loop1

mount -o loop /tmp/initrd.ext2 U

/mnt/loop1

This places the contents of Initrd in

/mnt/loop1 . The structure is shown in

Listing 3.

Listing 2: Creating a PCI Table

0x14e4 0x1644 "bcm5700" "BROADCOM NetXtreme 10/100/1000TX [onboard]"

0x14e4 0x1645 "bcm5700" "BROADCOM NetXtreme 10/100/1000TX [onboard]"

0x14e4 0x1646 "bcm5700" "BROADCOM NetXtreme 10/100/1000TX [onboard]"

0x14e4 0x1647 "bcm5700" "BROADCOM NetXtreme 10/100/1000TX [onboard]"

0x14e4 0x164D "bcm5700" "BROADCOM NetXtreme 10/100/1000TX [onboard]"

0x14e4 0x16A6 "bcm5700" "BROADCOM NetXtreme 10/100/1000TX [onboard]"

0x14e4 0x16A7 "bcm5700" "BROADCOM NetXtreme 10/100/1000TX [onboard]"

0x0e11 0x4070 "cciss" "Compaq RAID Controller Card"

0x0e11 0x4080 "cciss" "Compaq RAID Controller Card"

0x0e11 0x4082 "cciss" "Compaq RAID Controller Card"

0x0e11 0x4083 "cciss" "Compaq RAID Controller Card"

www.linux-magazine.com

May 2003

SYSADMIN

Red Hat Kickstart

The Compaq support site [2] has SRPM

drivers for the Broadcom NICs. The

standard cciss Linux kernel drivers are

recommended for the Smartarray RAID

controller. You need the Red Hat kernel

sources and a matching configuration

file on your development system to

create the modules:

version number has been assigned to the

modules. The output must correspond

to the vmlinuz kernel version on the

bootnet.img disk.

image can then be copied to the disk

using dd :

umount /mnt/loop1

gzip -c9 initrd.ext2 U

> initrd.img

cp initrd.img /mnt/loop0/

umount /mnt/loop0

dd if=/tmp/bootnet.img U

of=/dev/fd0H1440 bs=512

Automatically Loading the

Additional Modules

To ensure that the kernel automatically

loads the new drivers, module depen-

dencies and PCI ID assignments must be

correct.

Module dependencies are configured

in modules.dep . The template in

/lib/modules/2.4.18-3BOOT/modules.dep

is fine for any standard Linux kernel

drivers, but it is often a case of trial and

error for other drivers.

cciss.o and bcm5700.o do not require

any additional modules, not even a scsi

driver. The cciss is a block device driver,

so there are no changes required to mod-

ules.dep .

The driver assignment for PCI identi-

fication numbers is stored in the /mnt/

loop1/modules/pcitable configuration

file. The file content is comprised of four

tab-separated columns:

• Manufacturer identification

•Device identification

• Module name

• Description

Jim Boemler’s web site [3] gives a list of

possible manufacturer and device IDs.

Several entries match the array controller

and network adapters in our system (see

Listing 3), and so they need to be added

to pcitable .

rpm -i kernel-source-2.4.18 U

-3.i386.rpm

cd /usr/src/linux-2.4.18-3

cp configs/kernel*BOOT .config

A modified image may be too large to

store on a floppy disk. You will need to

delete several drivers from Initrd. Avoid

making multiple changes to Initrd in one

step: the Ext-2 filesystem will release any

unused blocks when you delete an entry,

but it does not remove their content.

Data of this kind is difficult to compress

and can increases the size of the image.

You need to type ks at the Lilo prompt

to boot the disk with the Kickstart server.

To install a server without a keyboard or

screen, you should change the default

line in syslinux.cfg to default ks .

To ensure that the newly compiled

modules will have the right Kernel

version number, you will need to change

the EXTRAVERSIONS line in the Makefile

to -3BOOT . For Red Hat 7.3 the APM

option must additionally be disabled

using make menuconfig .

Compiling New Drivers

This might also be a good opportunity

to enable a driver module for the array

controller. The driver is located in the

Block Devices kernel configuration menu

under Compaq Smart Array 5xxx

support . When we launch the compiler

one of the modules it creates is cciss.o ;

this module must be placed on the Kick-

start disk:

Red Hat in 15 Minutes

This method allows you to install Red

Hat Linux on a keyboardless Proliant

Server DL380 G3 in just 15 minutes. As

we had to install more than 20 machines

of this type, it was well worth the effort

of modifying a bootnet disk.

make dep clean bzImage

make modules modules_install

cp /lib/modules/2.4.18-3BOOT/ U

kernel/drivers/block/cciss.o U

/tmp/2.4.18-3BOOT/

INFO

[1] Kickstart documentation:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/

linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/custom-guide/

[2] Compaq support page for Linux drivers:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/

files/server/us/locOsCat/86.html

[3] PCI Vendor and Device List:

http://www.yourvote.com/pci/

Compiling a New Image

Now that we have all the drivers, we use

them to start assembling a boot disk.

We’ll start with the drivers modules by

creating a cpio archive, use Gzip to com-

press it, storing the results in initrd.ext2

– which is still mounted as /mnt/loop1 :

SRPM makes compiling the Compaq

driver for the NICs simple – although

you do need to ensure that you modify

.config and Makefile in the kernel

sources, as previously described, before

doing so. We also need the bcm5700.o

module on the disk:

Oliver Schade is

employed as a Linux

and storage con-

sultant and

Teamleader for Pro

Business Berlin AG,

Berlin, Germany.

While still at university, studying

computer science, Oliver worked for

various Internet providers in entirely

Linux based environments. His Linux

experience dates back to 1992 and the

0.96b kernel.

rpm -i /tmp/bcm5700-*src.rpm

cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS

rpm -ba bcm5700.spec

rpm -i /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/ U

i386/bcm5700*

cp /lib/modules/2.4.18-3BOOT/ U

kernel/drivers/net/bcm5700.o U

/tmp/2.4.18-3BOOT/

cd /tmp

find 2.4.18-3BOOT -print U

-depth | cpio -ov -H crc U

> modules.cpio

gzip -c9 modules.cpio U

> modules.cgz

cp -f modules.cgz /mnt/ U

loop1/modules/

The strings bcm5700.o | grep kernel

command tells us whether the correct

The next step is to copy the modified

Initrd back to the Kickstart image – it is

available on /mnt/loop0 . The complete

May 2003

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