CentOS 4.6 VMWare Server Kickstart

As promised, this is the kickstart that I’m using for my Dell PowerEdge 1950’s. Setting up and configuring kickstart is beyond the scope of this article (but may be covered in a later one). You will probably want to tweak the partitioning setup to suit your own taste. We’re ordering our servers with an 80GB boot/OS drive, and a 750GB drive just to hold VMWare Virtual Machines.

This kickstart will get you a minimal CentOS 4.6 install, with some useful tools, and all of the pre-reqs met for VMWare Server 1.0.4 as well as Dell OpenManage. I am sure it could be whittled down further, but disk is cheap and it’s served me well so far.

install
network –device=eth0 –bootproto=dhcp
url –url http://fqdn.of.server.com/osprov/media/Linux/CentOS46-AMD64/
reboot
text
lang en_US.UTF-8
langsupport –default en_US.UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8
keyboard us
mouse none
skipx
rootpw –iscrypted <crypted password>
firewall –disabled
selinux –disabled
authconfig –enableshadow –enablemd5
timezone America/New_York
bootloader –location=mbr

# Partitioning
# This sets the 80GB SATA boot drive to hold /boot, rootfs, and swap
# and sets the 750gb SATA drive to hold VMWare VM’s at /var/lib/vmware
clearpart –all –initlabel
part /boot –size=128 –ondisk=sda
part / –size=1024 –grow –fstype=ext3 –ondisk=sda
part swap –recommended –ondisk=sda
part /var/lib/vmware –size=1024 –grow –fstype=ext3 –ondisk=sdb

%packages –resolvedeps
kernel
e2fsprogs
ntp

#VMWare Server Deps
perl
xinetd
gcc
make
kernel-devel
xorg-x11-libs.i386
zlib-devel
zlib-devel.i386
compat-db
compat-db.i386
compat-glibc
compat-glibc.i386
compat-glibc-headers
compat-libstdc++-33
compat-libstdc++-33.i386
compat-libstdc++-296.i386

#Dell OpenManage Deps
audit-libs.i386
cracklib.i386
cracklib-dicts.i386
libxml2.i386
#glib2-2.4.7-1.i386
glib2.i386
#libselinux-1.19.1-7.4.i386
libselinux.i386
#ncurses-5.4-13.el4.i386
ncurses.i386
pam.i386

%post
rpm -i http://fqdn.of.server.com/osprov/media/VMWare/VMware-server-1.0.4-56528.i386.rpm
wget http://fqdn.of.server.com/osprov/media/VMWare/VMware-mui-1.0.4-56528.tar.gz -O /tmp/VMware-mui-1.0.4-56528.tar.gz

#Dell Yum Repository (OpenManage, etc.)
wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/bootstrap.cgi | bash
wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/bootstrap.cgi | bash

ntpdate pool.ntp.org