Can the NFS media location be passed to anaconda as a kernel arg?

[Wes Hardin]

On 04/28/2010 03:36 PM, Wes Hardin wrote:
> On 04/28/2010 01:15 PM, Kyle McDonald wrote:
>> I want to setup PXE network installs that are interactive, but I'd like
>> to limit the amount of questions the user has to enter for each one. The
>> PXE boot already passes some kernel args to configure the serial
>> console, and force a vnc install. I'm wondering if I can also supply the
>> NFS location for the media as a kernel arg so that users don't need to
>> type it in everytime (It's always the same, and it's long.)
>>
>> Also I know when doing KickStart installs, you can use ks-device=eth1 to
>> avoid being prompted for the network device when there is more than one.
>> Can I use this same option so that the interactive user doesn't have to
>> know which eth to pick?
>>
>> On a related note, is there a way to have anaconda figure out which
>> interface the PXE boot booted the machine on and just go with that one?
>> Right now I need to make 2 different PXE boot config files for the 2
>> types of machines I have because one boots on eth0 and the other on eth1.
>
> I don't think media location is something you pass in on the kernel line.
> Instead, what you can pass in is the path to a kickstart file which then answers
> a lot of those repetitive questions, such as the location of the install tree.
> The kickstart file can be as complete or as minimal as you wish.  I have one
> that only contains the network location of the install tree and waits for the
> installer to answer the rest.
>
> As for using the same interface that you PXE'd from, check out the
> ksdevice=bootif option, described briefly here:
>
> http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/KickStart
>
> This document from Dell mentions it too:
>
> http://linux.dell.com/files/whitepapers/nic-enum-whitepaper-v2.pdf
>
> I don't claim to have figured this out myself, it's set by default on all my
> Cobbler PXE profiles.

And just as a note, I don't think this works on RHEL4.  I had a workstation last 
week with 2 interfaces that I ended up just disabling the second interface to 
get it to work sanely.

Here's the note on the change from the Cobbler folks, which includes a link to 
the relevant Fedora 9 documentation:

https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/cobbler/2008-September/000824.html

--
/* Wes Hardin */