Provisioning

From Consultancy.EdVoncken.NET

OS Provisioning encompasses the installation and basic configuration of the operating system, plus application stack, on a new host.

Contents 1 Kickstart 2 Version Control 3 Software Repositories 4 Troubleshooting 5 References 6 See Also

Kickstart

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS deployments, we use Kickstart installations.

If you add in some PXE-dust and TFTP-magic, you get a network provisioning server, called Cobbler. Together with Koan, Cobbler allows you to perform bare-metal as well as virtual installs.

Version Control

Configuration files and scripts need to be kept under version control, just like programmers do. There are several alternatives:

• RCS
• CVS
• Subversion
• Git

For locally managed files, RCS is sufficient. If you need a centralized repository, use CVS or Subversion. If you want to work in disconnected mode a lot, use a distributed version control system such as Git.

Software Repositories

• Yum
• Novi

Troubleshooting

Problem

On a fresh install, yum update breaks with depsolving problems (in my case, fipscheck-lib).

Cause

Yum repository conflicts.

Solution

Run lsb_release -a; uname -a; yum repolist all and check for non-standard repositories.
Disable them, run yum clean all and try again. (thanks to IRC #centos).

References

• HOWTO Build your own provisioning server

See Also

• UDA - Ultimate Deployment Appliance (Open Source)