Installation Procedure

For virtual machine

To install virtual machine, you will need to create a kickstart file and create a VM that will use the kickstart file to configure it-self.

Let’s imagine you want create a VM called vmtest001. You need to do the following step

cd /usr/local/adm/kickstarts
./CreateCentOS7VMKickStart vmtest001
cd /usr/local/adm/libvirt/bin
./CreateCentOS7 vmtest01

For physical machine

For physical machine we need to have some information about the hardware. Mainly there are 2 important informations

  • Hard-drive Informations

  • Ethernet MAC Address of the machine

The HDD Information can be found wrote directly on the disk (on the sticker) There are 2 important informations, Model Name (MDL) and Serial Name (S/N). The MAC address can be found into machine BIOS and looks like 00:11:22:33:44:55

Let’s imagine that a machine named atlas006 with the following information

  • HDD MDL: WD2002FYPS-02W3B0

  • HDD S/N: WCAVY7272598

  • Ethernet MAC Address: bc:ae:c5:59:5b:c5

We now need to store information in 2 files

  • /usr/local/adm/kickstarts/rootdisks.txt: Where HDD information will be store

  • /var/lib/cobbler/mac-address/mac.lst: Where MAC Address information will be store

Now you have to create kickstart file and create a cobbler entry to allow network installation

cd /usr/local/adm/kickstarts
./CreateCentOS7KickStart atlas006
mv config/atlas006.ks /var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts/
cd /var/lib/cobbler/bin
./AddNewHost atlas006

You can now force the machine to boot on network (F12 keytab) and select the profile “atlas006” (for our example).

For all the machine

After the initial configuration, we need to do some additional config. Those additionnal config is allmost done through puppet, so you have to allow your machine to contact puppet.

We will connect to puppet

ssh puppet

Puppet use certificate to communicate with machine. When a machine is installed, the machine create a certificate and send it to puppetserver. To see which certificate waiting for validation you can do

puppetserver ca list

To approve a certificate and allow a machine to retrieve a profile, you need to do

puppetserver ca sign --certname atlas006.najah.edu

After that, you can re-run puppet agent from your machine

ssh atlas006
puppet agent -t