Kickstart from Hard Drive ISO

I'm building a machine that may need to be remotely re-imaged, without the benefit a kickstart server.  I've always heard that you can kick a machine from itself, but had never tried it.  Truthfully, it's probably more trouble than its worth.  The best option would be to install a DVD drive with media, but configure the BIOS such that DVD is after the main drive.  Since I didn't want an optical drive on this machine, here's how to kickstart a machine from a hard drive.

Let's do this backwards.  Get the machine to image off an HTTP server and then change the ks.cfg:

#url --url http://1.2.3.4/rhel6
harddrive --partition=/dev/sdb1 --dir=/

Notice that I'm telling the machine that its image is on sdb, not sda.  Providing two drives is safer that trying to image off the boot/root drive, but it could be a partition on the same drive.  Besides, I've got dozens of little drives laying around doing nothing.  Further down in the file, I also indicated:

#clearpart --all
clearpart --drives=sda

Next, we mount the second drive and copy the ISO into the root of the drive.  To clarify:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
cp rhel-6-x86_64-dvd.iso /mnt/

When kickstarting from a local drive, we use the ISO file itself... not an extracted or loop mounted filesystem.  Looking back at the first change we made to the ks.cfg, we indicated --dir=/, so we are telling the installer that the ISO is on the top level of the drive.

As a matter of convenience, mount the ISO, because we need a few files from it:

mkdir /mnt/rhel6
mount rhel-6-x86_64-dvd.iso /mnt/rhel6 -o loop

Copy three files:

mkdir /mnt/images
cp /mnt/rhel6/images/install.img /mnt/images
cp /mnt/rhel6/isolinux/vmlinuz /mnt/images
cp /mnt/rhel6/isolinux/initrd.img /mnt/images

If you were going to allow the machine to rebuild different versions (or distros) you would want to add a version number to each file.

To initiate the rebuild, we will use the tried and true Grub rebuild hack:

cd /boot
cp /mnt/images/vmlinuz /boot
cp /mnt/images/initrd.img /boot
cat >> /boot/grub/grub.conf << EOF
title Rebuild
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /vmlinuz ramdisk_size=8192 ks=hd:sdb1/ks/ks.cfg
  initrd /initrd.img
EOF

Many docs indicate that the second drive has to be made bootable.  In this case, we are still booting off the primary drive, but only long enough to read the ks.cfg from sdb and switch to install.img.  Once install.img has control, it will read the clearpart command, wipe sda, and reinstall from sdb.

There is a "gotcha" I've not quite worked out yet.  As we all know, Linux is notorious for renaming drive letters at boot time.  It is possible that  the machine might confuse sda and sdb.  This could be disastrous if the machine crashed, and while trying to rebuild, it wiped the image drive!  The good news is that the installer reports that it can't find the image and kickstart file, and fails.  Just reboot until it finds the correct drive.

* It would seem that either a UUID or LABEL could be used in both Grub and the kickstart file.  I'll add checking those possibilities to my ToDo list.  Or you could figure that part out and let me know which works.  Its only fair: I've already done the hard part for you.