Installing RHEL5

Special Notes for Provisioning RedHat Enterprise Linux 5

In order to provision RHEL5 nodes, there are some differences from standard RedHat Linux provisioning due to the age and idiosyncrasies of the older OS.

Serve the ISO image over port 80

RHEL5 does not appear to take a custom port for the installer. It is possible to use the puppetlabs-apache module and hiera to serve up the ISO when mounted loopback:

Example code for NFS rhel5 ISO:

  mount { $mntrepo_name :
    ensure   => 'mounted',
    device   => $mntrepo_device,
    fstype   => 'nfs',
    options  => 'soft,intr,tcp',
    remounts => false,
    atboot   => true,
    require  => File[$mntrepo_name],
  }

  mount { '/rhel5':
    ensure   => 'mounted',
    device   => "${mntrepo_name}/RedHat/ISO/rhel-server-5.10-x86_64-dvd.iso",
    fstype   => 'iso9660',
    options  => 'ro,loop',
    remounts => true,
    atboot   => true,
    require  => [ File['/rhel5'], Mount[$mntrepo_name] ],
  }

Example apache entries in hiera:

apache::default_vhost: false
apache_vhosts:
  razor.company.com:
    priority: 15
    port: 80
    docroot: /var/www/html
    aliases:
      - alias: /svc/repo/rhel5.10
        path: /rhel5
    directories:
      - path: /rhel5
        options:
          - Indexes
          - FollowSymLinks
          - MultiViews
        allow_override: None
        order: Allow,Deny
        allow: 'from all'

Modify URLs in the RHEL5 Task

The sample RHEL6 task can be modified fairly easily for RHEL5. However, some of the built-in URL shortcuts do not resolve with the proper port under RHEL5 and need to be fully written out. The two most important are in kickstart.erb:

#curl -s -o /root/razor_postinstall.sh <%= file_url("post_install") %>
curl -s -o /root/razor_postinstall.sh http://razor.company.com:8150/svc/file/1/post_install

#curl -s <%= stage_done_url("kickstart") %>
curl -s http://razor.company.com:8150/svc/stage-done/1?name=kickstart