Custom ISO with Kickstart and Local Repos

[Vinícius Ferrão]

Firas, thank you.

That’s appears to be exactly what I need.

I’ll be doing some test tomorrow and report back.

V.

> On 22 Feb 2018, at 22:40, Firas Alshafei <Firas.Alshafei at us.abb.com> wrote:
> 
> V,
> 
> If you're adding rpms then you'll need to update the repo to actually include them. I'm not familiar with Lorax so I can't really help there, but if your end goal is  a standard RHEL dvd with extra packages that you want to define in your kickstart configuration then it should just require createrepo and genisoimage.
> 
> My use case is fairly vanilla kickstart you might have to modify to suit your workflow.
> - isolinux and efi use the inst.ks and inst.stage2 to point to kickstart file and installation source respectively.
> - kickstart file and pre/post/conf scripts in DVD/kickstart directory structure
> - Packages in the default DVD/Packages and additional packages in /DVD/Packages-Extra
> - I delete all uneeded packages to reduce DVD size, just feed the rpm -qa output on an installed system to yumdownloader
> 
> Here's a script stub - I do something similar in-house to get our DVDs created for air-gapped environments (it's a pain).
> Hope this helps 😊
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> #===================================================================================
> # Title        : create-iso
> #
> # Description  : Generate kickstart dvd
> #
> # Author       : Firas AlShafei
> #
> # Last Revised : 11/04/2015
> #
> #===================================================================================
> 
> # Assume following path structure
> #
> # working-directory
> # |
> # ---> creat-iso.sh
> # |
> # ---> media (DVD media + kickstart + additional packages)
> 
> # Path variables
> scriptPath=$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")")
> isoPath=${scriptPath}
> releaseName="my-awesome-dvd.iso"
> 
> # Move repo group info
> mv ${scriptPath}/media/repodata/*-comps-Server.x86_64.xml ${scriptPath}/media/repodata/comps-Server.x86_64.xml
> 
> # Create repo
> cd ${scriptPath}/media
> createrepo --quiet --pretty --update --groupfile repodata/comps-Server.x86_64.xml .
> 
> # Make ISO file
> echo "== Generate DVD Image"
> echo "= ${isoPath}/${releaseName}.iso"
> genisoimage -r -T -J -V ${releaseName} \
> -quiet                                \
> -o ${isoPath}/${releaseName}.iso      \
> -no-emul-boot                         \
> -boot-load-size 4                     \
> -boot-info-table                      \
> -b isolinux/isolinux.bin              \
> -c isolinux/boot.cat                  \
> -eltorito-alt-boot                    \
> -no-emul-boot                         \
> -b images/efiboot.img                 \
> ${scriptPath}/media/
> 
>    
>                                                                                                        
> 
> Firas AlShafei
> Senior Lead Engineer
> Enterprise Software
> ABB
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Vinícius Ferrão
> Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 3:47 PM
> To: kickstart-list at redhat.com
> Subject: Custom ISO with Kickstart and Local Repos
> 
> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Kickstart-list mailing list
> Kickstart-list at redhat.com
> https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.redhat.com%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fkickstart-list&data=02%7C01%7Cfiras.alshafei%40us.abb.com%7C61f459f9ce2a4501b84d08d57a3dede1%7C372ee9e09ce04033a64ac07073a91ecd%7C0%7C0%7C636549328763319165&sdata=ryv0YW%2FzOdUplRFSLABdNkRZN%2BZKBJwKVw5CaSDJfRk%3D&reserved=0
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Kickstart-list mailing list
> Kickstart-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/kickstart-list