• A kickstart file for Fedora 17 was created, dellpcf17.cfg. This was based on the previous Fedora release with changes so that it installs in a different partition. Things to note about this kickstart file are:
• It specifies a particular single partition for the system to be installed into. In this case it's sda8.
• The bootloader command specifies --location=partition so that the grub bootloader is installed in the first sector of this partition (sda8), not the MBR.
• The kickstart file has a %pre section which does the following:
• If necessary, it partitions the drive: it recognises the type of disk drive from a set of known types and uses sfdisk to apply a predefined set of partitions. My ptn.sh script is useful offline in creating various sorts of partitioning. There is a sda1 reserved for OEM, sda2 for master grub, sda3 reserved for Windows boot area, sda4 extended, and sda5 onwards for systems, a swap area, and a final large area for sharing between the different systems.
• The kickstart file has a %post section which does the following:
• If there is no master grub on the drive, the kickstart %post script it formats sda2 and sets it up to be a master grub area, so that there is a grub stage1 in the MBR code area which knows about a grub directory on sda2, and where that grub directory on sda2 contains the stage2, and a grub.conf. The latter simply is a list of entries for all appropriate partitions, with a chainloader to the grub stage1 on the first sector of each such partition.
• If the system was booted with a "bhamvanilla" kernel parameter, then no extra action is taken. Otherwise, the %post script does a "rsync" to a specific server to provide an "overlay" of particular files on to the system as initially installed. This overlay of files includes an updated /etc/rc.d/rc.local, and various cron jobs, so as you can guess, this easily allows the system to configure itself after first boot. The overlay is repeated hourly thereafter. Using rsync is a very efficient way of checking and if necessary updating the several hundred files which comprise the overlay.
• I used my lnmisc script to hard-link this into an unadvertised directory in my personal web files, so that it could be downloaded at boot time.
• I created a CD or USB stick for network-install of Fedora 17, downloaded from the Fedora 17 website. This could easily be done by PXE boot if this was thought necessary. But a PC or server out of the box needs to have its BIOS configured for security anyway, so it's no additional effort to install via CD or USB stick.

-- LawrenceLowe created this topic in October 2012.