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4. Prerequisites

There are two approaches to a KickStart install - one is to simply copy your KickStart configuration file to a RedHat boot floppy. The other is to use a regular boot floppy and get your KickStart config file off the network.

In both cases, you'll need:

1. Intel (i386) class machines - KickStart appears to only work on these at the time of writing.
2. KickStart config file - we'll talk about this in the next section.
3. RedHat boot disk - preferably from the updates directory, to take advantage of any fixes/driver updates.
4. DNS entries for the IP addresses you'll be using - optional, but will stop the installation from prompting you for your machine's domain name.

If you want to fetch your config file over the network, you'll need to export it via NFS - this is the only access method supported at the moment. The config file lets you specify a different NFS server to fetch the RedHat distribution itself from.

You can configure a static IP address for your machine - e.g. a special one reserved for KickStart installations. Alternatively, if you don't want to hard code an IP address in the config file you can tell KickStart to use a BOOTP/DHCP server to fetch this. Some servers will allocate new addresses in a given range automatically, e.g. the CMU BOOTP server with dynamic addressing extensions.

More information on NFS and BOOTP/DHCP is in Appendix A.