Kickstart is an automated
installation or
upgrade system for
Red Hat Linux, similar to
Jumpstart for
Solaris or
Roboinst for
Irix, which makes the chore of configuring multiple hosts a great deal easier. Everything is controlled from
one file, which can either reside on the
boot floppy or a
network drive. This file can
partition the hard disk and configure the
X windows setup,
security,
language,
keyboard,
time zone,
mouse,
firewall (in Red Hat 7.1 -
Seawolf),
RAID and the
packages to install among other things. The final part of the config file allows the user to run any
scripts or site specific setup.In Red Hat 7.1 a new
kickstart configurator has been introduced which can ease the process of developing the config file.
I have used kickstart for a while now and found it to be both a powerful and reliable tool, unfortunately not much documentation was originally available but Red Hat seem to have that covered now, the original HOWTO can still be found on most Linux doc servers although it is rather out of date now.
http://www.redhat.com/support/manuals/RHL-7.1-Manual/customization-guide/ch-kickstart2.html