CentOS 8 Kickstart Questions?

[Gunnar Niels]

Hello,

I'm experimenting setting up a home CentOS 8 server with ~7 SATA
drives and would like to be able to insert a pen drive with an iso and
have it automatically install non-interactively. I've been trying to
craft my own iso with an embedded ks file that I've generated, and
I've read the docs but they leave a lot of questions remaining:

[Password Generation]
I'm trying to generate the hashed password to set in the kickstart, ex:

rootpw --iscrypted {{ root_pass_hash }}

I've read from a few sources that this can be generated via python
using the following:

python -c "import crypt; print(crypt.crypt('{{ root_password }}'))"

I'm using: "auth --passalgo=sha256 --useshadow" in my ks file, but in
my testing, the password I hashed is rejected. I'm assuming this is
because of some passalgo mismatch. I've also seen that the "auth"
keyword has been deprecated with RHEL8 (and I assume CentOS 8 as
well). What's the best way for me to generate a password and configure
the auth configuration so that the hash methods match?

[OS Disk Selection]
As mentioned, I will have 7 or 8 drives hooked up. One is a pendrive I
would like to use as the OS disk, and the others will be standard HDDs
over SATA. Inspecting the kickstarts that are generated after I
manually run through the GUI installer, I usually see an "ignoredisk
--only-use=/dev/sdX" statement in the kickstart, but I have no idea
which sdX disk will actually be my pendrive? What is the best practice
here so that I always select the same disk? I've seen some indication
there is a /dev/disk/by-partuuid I could potentially use, but that
would require me to set up partition tables for each of the drives and
therefore generate partuuids ahead of time. Any recommendations?

[graphical vs. text vs. cli?]
For an unattended installation, does it matter which of the above I
actually specify?

I will probably have some more questions as I dig into it, but rather
than overwhelm I'll leave my questions at that for now.

Thank you!
GN