Kickstart via PXE/NFS

Shabazian, Chip Chip.Shabazian at bankofamerica.com
Mon May 14 20:14:11 UTC 2007


You still have never answered the question.  We are trying to help you
here.  It doesn't matter whether or not your second NIC is plugged in,
it does however matter whether or not it is on the same bus as the NIC
you are pxebooting from.  As for why it works in pxe and doesn't work in
kickstart, they are two entirely different systems.  pxe comes from the
system BIOS, and the kickstart installer comes from RHEL.  The reason
this is important is because RHEL 4 + enumerates the bus differently
(and according to Red Hat properly) than either pxe or previous RHEL
versions.
 
As for "complicated", my time goes back to building "unattend.txt" files
for Windows 95 (and every version since), and kickstart is FAR more
powerful and easier to use than any of the windows technologies that are
included with the OS.  And if you don't like kickstart, try using YAST
sometime, that will make you old before your time.
 
This list is very helpful and has gotten many people to quality build
setups, but disparaging the tool that we are trying to help you deploy
isn't going to win friends or help.
 
At the end of the day, if you don't like anaconda, do something about
it.  It's open source and you can dive in and fix the things you don't
like, and submit the patches upstream.  There are many things *I* would
like to see changed, but I don't have the time to write a patch, so I
have to live with it or work around it.  At least now I can make the
changes if I wanted to... Sure wish I could have done that in Windows 10
years ago when I was trying to get an unattend.txt file to bring up a
backup domain controller that wasn't online with the primary since it
hadn't been built yet and was located in a different state.
 
Chip 

________________________________

From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of
SSTinsley at upsfreight.com
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 12:39 PM
To: Discussion list about Kickstart
Cc: Discussion list about Kickstart; kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
Subject: RE: Kickstart via PXE/NFS




kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com wrote on 05/14/2007 02:48:04 PM:

> How many NIC's do you have in the box?  Are they all embedded, or 
> are there some on cards? 

2 NICs. Only one is active an plugged in to a switch. 

While it may be powerful, it seems to be way more complicated than
should be required. 

If the server can find its initial IP via DHCP to load pxelinux and to
load the kernel, why is it 
unable to complete the last step and locate the kickstart file? I have
specified the ksdevice 
several different ways and none have been successful (ksdevice=eth0,
=link, =bootip with ipappend, =eth1) 
and in all cases anaconda ends up unable to get the IP and prompts me
for static network configuration. 
I enter the needed network information and provide the NFS information
to reach the RH install image and 
the box is able to read the o/s image and start an interactive install. 

I have also dropped to command line (ctl-alt-f2) and verified that the
nfs directory holding the KS file 
can be mounted. And I have verified it can be retrieved with http using
wget. And still anaconda is 
unable to retrieve the file with either nfs or http. 


>   
> Kickstart is a very powerful and useful tool that we use globally to
> build over 1000 distributed systems each year from a centralized and
> managed location, and although it has bugs like any product, most 
> issues like you are having tend to be infrastructure or manufacturer
related. 
>   
> From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:kickstart-list-
> bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of SSTinsley at upsfreight.com
> Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 11:36 AM
> To: Discussion list about Kickstart
> Cc: Discussion list about Kickstart; kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
> Subject: Re: Kickstart via PXE/NFS

> 
> I made a change to pxe cfg file to have ks.cfg file read via http. 
> 
> It fails too. However, if I look in the anaconda log I see the 
> message getting ks.cfg 
> but then failed to transfer ks.cfg to fd. The snoop from the KS 
> server side shows the HTTP 
> retrieval of the KS config file. Is it really trying to use an fd 
> device, a floppy? These 
> Dell servers do not include floppys. 
> 
> Redhat sure has taken something that should be relatively easy and 
> made it a pain in the butt. 
>   
> 
> kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com wrote on 05/14/2007 01:29:54 PM:
> 
> > if you page-up in vty3, can you see what your kernel command line
is?
> > alternately if it makes it to shell in vty2, 'cat /proc/cmdline' - i
> > wonder if it's actually doing the ipappend stuff. you might need a
> > newer pxelinux.0 if not. also, instead of 'ksdevice=bootif' you can
do
> > 'ksdevice=link ip=dhcp'  ; the bootif argument is more useful if you
> > have 2 nics enabled/link-up and want to make sure it doesnt pxeboot
> > out one interface and then ks out the other.
> > 
> > -=Eric
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Kickstart-list mailing list
> > Kickstart-list at redhat.com
> > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/kickstart-list 
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