Custom ISO with Kickstart and Local Repos

[Vinícius Ferrão]

Hello,

I’m trying to create a custom ISO with a Kickstart file to achieve a complete offline installation.

I was able to create the Kickstart file as usual, since I use it for PXE installs for at least 10 years, but the major problem now is building the ISO with the necessary files.

I’ve came across a tool named Lorax, but I was not able to create a custom ISO from DVD’s. It only works when point to mirrors, and this is a time consuming task. Another problem is that Lorax does not seems to care about the /usr/share/lorax/product folder to create a custom Anaconda with the embedded kickstart file on /usr/share/anaconda/interactive-defaults.ks.

The small ISO generated by Lorax lacks local repositories and I was unable to find the appropriate documentation on how to build this scenario. So it generates a boot only install that must be done over the Internet.

At this moment I’m running Lorax on a CentOS install, I’ve got RHEL licenses too, but to keep it simple I just went with CentOS. I think this is irrelevant information but it’s just for the sake of completion.

With genisoimage I was able to add the custom product.img file, that I’ve generated by hand with cpio, on the ISO but I was not able to solve the local repos problem. There are packages that I would like to add to the install media, like Ansible, but they are available only on the Extras repository and I’m unsure on how to do this. Just wondering if createrepo and yumdownloader are necessary...

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
V.