The Kickstart Book

Quick Links

You can buy the book from O'Reilly!

Download novi to build pre-patched Kickstart trees.

Where am I?

Congratulations! You have stumbled on to the companion website for Managing RPM-Based Systems with Kickstart and Yum, published by the fine folks at O'Reilly and Associates.

(If you've already read the book, and want to use novi, you can download it here.)

What does the book cover?

Managing RPM-Based Systems with Kickstart and Yum. explains how to use... well, Kickstart and yum. These tools help you automate certain systems admin tasks on RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, and other Red Hat-based distributions.

How will this help me?

Do you have to setup five, fifty, or even five hundred machines in a hurry? You could waste a few days doing that by hand (assuming nothing else interrupts you). Let Kickstart trim that time to a few hours. Maybe you have to apply updates ("patches" for the old guard) to a lot of machines. yum manages package dependencies for you and can even install updates automatically.

After guiding you though the basics of Kickstart and yum, this book will show you how to customize these tools to reap even greater benefit. Learn how to further automate Kickstart by pre-patching the OS installer, and how to build custom yum repos for greater change control.

Who wrote it?

The Author

Ethan McCallum provided the text.

His work appears online on The O'Reilly Network (including OnJAVA, OnLAMP, and LinuxDevCenter) and Java.net, and also in print publications such as C/C++ Users Journal, Doctor Dobb's Journal, and Linux Magazine. Topics range from design to implementation, and from software to systems architecture.

Ethan is co-founder of Standard 6, a Paris-based technologoy consulting firm. In the US, he is a member of Open Foundation's managed services wing. Outside of work, Ethan publishes Kickstart-related tips and software through his website at ExMachinaTech.net.

He extends his deepest gratitude to his editor and review crew, whose insight and suggestions made this book worth reading.

The Review Crew

Derek Ashmore provides architecture and design services for web applications. Derek is the author of The J2EE Architect's Handbook . He can be reached at http://www.dvt.com/

Derek Torres is an author and writer. He has authored or co-authored several books on Windows operating systems; he also reguarly contributes to online and print publications on current IT topics. He blogs at http://www.derektorres.net/.

The Editor

chromatic promotes free and open source software for O'Reilly's Open Technology Exchange. In practice, this means editing and researching.

He is the author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, a co-author of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook, the lead author of Perl Hacks, and a co-author of The Art of Agile Development.

chromatic has contributed to several projects including Perl 5, Perl 6, Pugs, and, these days, Parrot. Someday, he'd like to claim some responsibility for improving the quality of all software.

What's next?

Over time, this site will expand on the book material and note any errata.