I have just released a new article explaining how to set up a Kickstart server as a way of achieving speedy, reliable and standardised RCSL server installations.

In some ways, it’s just a rather more Kickstart-focussed version of my existing ‘how to build an Apache web server’ piece.

However, it’s a little bit more than that, because it introduces two things:

• The Dixnix Kickstart Configurator; and
• Palmerston (the post-Gladstone shell script)

The Kickstart Configurator is just a little something I threw together to avoid the tedium of having to remember to alter the network details in a Kickstart file before re-using it. It will additionally do most of the Oracle prerequisites for you, if you ask it to.

Palmerston is simply a version of my Gladstone Oracle pre-installation script that omits the downloading/installing of software packages… because the Kickstart configuration script generated by the Configurator will have already handled all software prerequisites for you, if you asked it to. It also ditches all support for non RCSL distros, because only an RCSL user will ever be invoking it (everyone else will still be invoking Gladstone).

Together, they make building RCSL servers in general and Oracle servers in particular just that little bit easier. (Well, they do for me, anyway!)