Kick Start - Creating User in Automatic Installation

In the lecture, Prof. John Selmy suggested me to have a look of kick start configuration options, I may able to use one or two function from kickstart. So I did.. and yeah.. it dose support user creation!

It seems useful. When I was thinking how to use it, I had a second thought. Because if I use kickstart to do user migration, then, the adminstrator can not use the Windows Data Migration Tools (WDMT) after installation. Then it is not the concept of WDMT, cos we want WDMT to support post-installation migration.

But i found some other usefull options. First one is cmdline, it support some non-interactive command to run during installation. It's cool. Because you can run your own bash, python script to do something that the installation dose not support. Second one is firstboot, it will allow system to enable or disable firstboot to run after the system is installed. I would properly disable it if I am using kick start to install a lot of machines. Because I prefer to do those first boot functions our self. ^^

Anyway, I was of surprised how many options kickstart support.. There must be like 100 options. It's a really good administrators tool. ^^

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user (optional)
Creates a new user on the system.
user --name= [--groups=] [--homedir=] [--password=] [--iscrypted] [--shell=] [--uid=]

--name=
Provides the name of the user. This option is required.
--groups=
In addition to the default group, a comma separated list of group names the user should belong to.
--homedir=
The home directory for the user. If not provided, this defaults to /home/.
--password=
The new user's password. If not provided, the account will be locked by default.
--iscrypted
Is the password provided by --password already encrypted or not?
--shell=
The user's login shell. If not provided, this defaults to the system default.
--uid=
The user's UID. If not provided, this defaults to the next available non-system UID.

cmdline (optional)
Perform the installation in a completely non-interactive command line mode. Any prompts for interaction will halt the install. This mode is useful on S/390 systems with the x3270 console.

firstboot (optional)
Determine whether the Setup Agent starts the first time the system is booted. If enabled, the firstboot package must be installed. If not specified, this option is disabled by default.

--enable or --enabled
The Setup Agent is started the first time the system boots.
--disable or --disabled
The Setup Agent is not started the first time the system boots.
--reconfig
Enable the Setup Agent to start at boot time in reconfiguration mode. This mode enables the language, mouse, keyboard, root password, security level, time zone, and networking configuration options in addition to the default ones.