Network installations are useful and advantageous especially in scenarios where you have to install the OS on multiple systems.

If you use a boot ISO or the Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) to install the OS on systems, you can set up a network installation configuration that consists of the following components:

• A network installation server that provides the IP and network configuration, the PXE configuration files, kernel and boot images, and kernel boot directives. In this example, dnsmasq is used to provide these services.

• A network accessible file system server over a protocol such as NFS or HTTP, where packages, the Kickstart file, and other required configuration files might be stored. In this document, NFS is used as the file system. Note that if your systems have direct access to the Internet, you can configure your Kickstart installation to use the BaseOS and AppStream repositories directly available on the Oracle Linux yum server for the package installation. You can also create a yum mirror of these repositories as described in Oracle Linux: Managing Software on Oracle Linux so that systems that do not have direct access to the Internet have access to a complete set of packages. However, you would still need to provide a mechanism to serve the Kickstart file up to the system when it boots.

The two components can be on separate systems. Also, they are not required to run the latest Oracle Linux version. A previous release would suffice. For convenience, the scenario in this example assumes that the two components are hosted in one system. It also assumes that Kickstart installation is used.