Q: Can you have all outstanding patches (update RPMs) applied automatically too ? How ?
A1: Copy the RPMs you want installing to the RPMS directory from which the installation is going to take place, get rid of the older RPMS, and update the file RedHat/base/hdlist with the new RPM details. See below for a script from Eric Doutreleau to do this for you. If you do this yourself, remember to run genhdlist afterwards!
A2: Try this Perl script: patchup. This compares the RPMS your system has installed with those in a nominated directory and reports on the ones it thinks need updating. It can even install them for you if you trust it to.
A3: rpm2hml has a much more powerful (12MB of C code vs. a page of Perl!) version of A2.
Q: A single config file on the install server for all of the clients, perhaps as a fallback after trying IPADDR-kickstart ?
A: ?
Q: More flexibility when things go wrong - e.g. prompt for alternate locations if distribution not found on CD-ROM.
A: ?
Q: Explicit exclusion of packages - e.g. everything apart from sendmail.
A: ?
Q: Choose which services are started automatically on boot-up by the run-level scripts under /etc/rc.d/.
A: The chkconfig utility lets you configure which services are run automatically on boot-up. You can run this in your post-installation script section, e.g. to run ypbind in run levels 3, 4 and 5:
chkconfig --level 345 ypbind on
and it will start the ypbind level on the 345 level.
Q: When executing the shell commands in the %post section,
bring any output up in another virtual console rather than overwriting the
main screen. Could be done in the shell commands section using
open?.
A: No problem - do something like this:
exec >/dev/tty5
Q: Does the filesystem creation code check for bad blocks ?
A: If you switch to the virtual console where the filesystem creation output is being displayed, you won't see any mention of the 'read-only' test being performed.