Issues with RH7 kickstart via USB and PXE

[Greg Oliver]

On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 6:39 AM, Andrew Simpson <simpsonar77 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have had a few issues migrating from RHEL 6 kickstart installs to RHEL 7.
>
> 1.  pxeboot installs were failing because I did not have the LiveOS
> directory included in the customized ISO.  Is the LiveOS directory (and the
> images in it) required in RHEL 7 now?
> 2.  in pxeboot, I had to have the proper order of options in the
> isolinux.cfg (pxelinux.cfg) file.  We were also using NFS for the install.
> Lastly, the pxeboot server is older, and caused issues with the nfs version.
> The order of relevant options was:
>
> inst.stage2=nfs4:10.0.0.1:/path/to/installdir
> inst.ks=nfs:10.0.0.1:/path/to/installdir/ksdir/file.ks
> inst.repo=nfs4:/10.0.0.1:/path/to/installdir
>
> Notice that inst.ks=nfs didn't require the nfs version, but repo and stage2
> did.  The order was also important for whatever reason.
>
> 3.  USB installs worked under RHEL 6.  Now, I'm having issues.  Under RHEL 6
> I would use live-iso-to-disk to write the files to the USB drive.  This came
> from the livecd-tools packages in fedora.
>
> 4.  I currently am able to do PXE installs and DVD installs without fail.
>
> Under RHEL 7, the livecd-tools utilities no longer work for this as the
> livecd-iso-to-disk script finds the LiveOS directory in the iso and stops
> processing anything else, treating it as a LiveOS image.  So this goes back
> to Number 1 above.  Is the LiveOS required?  Is there anyway to use
> livecd-tools to generate the USB drive?
>
> The generation of the iso is correct and I'm using isohybrid on the .iso.
> Under RHEL 6, the usb drive would work flawlessly.
>
> I switched to using the following while building on a RHEL.6 (soon to be
> rhel.7) system:
>
> pv -treb my.iso | dd of=/dev/sdc conv=noerrors,notrunc
>
>
> So, is there a better way to make a bootable usb via command line -or- what
> is the proper way to do this?

I assume RedHat made the same changes to RHEL that they made to Fedora
a few release back that broke this same behaviour.  IIRC, I had to
boot the live CD, and look at the root mountpoint and pass
root=LABEL=<Whatever Was Mounted There> to get it working again.  They
changed they way the rootfs was mounted in the live image.  A newer
usb creater may fix it, but I ultimately switched 100% to using boot
emulation with grub4dos and / or grub2 since I do not have time to rip
all this apart every time they change something like this.  Ultimately
I ditched using USB and switched 100% to PXE (iPXE and gPXE combo)
since I only had to maintain one set of files and not 100s of USB
sticks.

Today unfortunately we are 100% virtual, so VMware gets PXE loaded and
a generic RedHat image gets laid down.  I do not have backups that go
back far enough to get my config files unfortunately.  If you are not
EFI dependent, then grub4dos is by far the easiest for USB.  You just
throw the vendor's ISO on the stcik and it boots it like a CD.

eg:

title Install ESXi - IBM 5.5u2
    map --mem /ESXi-5.5u2-2068190-IBM_20150310.iso (hd32)
    map --hook
    chainloader (hd32)
    boot

Inside that ISO you can put the ks file, etc, or you can APPEND it
directly there.

If you need EFI, then you would need to use grub2.

> Should the iso layout mostly be exactly like the oem iso, with the exception
> of the changed isolinux.cfg file(s), ks files, and additional
> packages/repodata?
>
> Thanks for all and any help/information you can provide!
>
> Andrew
>
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