CentOS 8 Kickstart Questions?

[Pablo Iranzo Gómez]

Hi Gunnar,

+++ Gunnar Niels [27/05/20 13:39 -0400]:
>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:


Not tested in a while with kickstart, but information could still be
helpful (inline)
>
>[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?

If you don't mind on storing it in the kickstart, pregenerate it, or
even put something basic and then reconfigure in %post


>[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?

You can do disk partitioning with a script

Use %pre to define the partitioning, so that you can use your custom
script to find out UID, connection type, size, $whatever, then, include
that file:


#Partitionning
zerombr


%include /tmp/part-include



and then:

%pre
#!/bin/sh

#Remove swapping just in case was in use
swapoff -a
echo "Remove previous LV"
for VG in `LANG=C lvm vgscan 2>&1 |grep "Found volume group"|awk '{print $4}'|tr -d "\""`
do
         lvm lvchange -ff -a n /dev/$VG/*
         lvm vgremove -ff $VG
done
for PV in `LANG=C lvm pvscan 2>&1 |grep PV|awk '{print $2}'`
do
         lvm pvremove -y -ff $PV
done

#Get number of drives and sizes
set $(list-harddrives)
let numd=$#/2 # Número de discos
d1=$1 # First disk device
S1=$2 # Firt disk size

DISK=$d1

echo "clearpart --drives=$DISK --all --initlabel" >> /tmp/part-include

echo "part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=100 --ondisk=$DISK" >> /tmp/part-include
echo "part pv.100000 --size=1 --grow --ondisk=$DISK" >>  /tmp/part-include
echo "volgroup myvg --pesize=32768 pv.100000" >> /tmp/part-include
echo "logvol swap --fstype swap --name=Swap --vgname=myvg --size=2047" >> /tmp/part-include
echo "logvol  / --fstype ext4 --name=root --vgname=myvg --size=2048" >> /tmp/part-include
echo "logvol /home --fstype ext4 --size=1000 --name=home --vgname=myvg" >> /tmp/part-include
echo "logvol /tmp --fstype ext4 --size=2048 --name=tmp --vgname=myvg" >> /tmp/part-include
echo "logvol /usr --fstype ext4 --size=3000 --name=usr --vgname=myvg" >> /tmp/part-include
echo "logvol /opt --fstype ext4 --size=8192 --name=opt --vgname=myvg" >> /tmp/part-include



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

Cli, uses less RAM so it starts faster

>
>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
>
>_______________________________________________
>Kickstart-list mailing list
>Kickstart-list at redhat.com
>https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/kickstart-list

-- 

Pablo Iranzo Gómez (Pablo.Iranzo at redhat.com)          GnuPG: 0x5BD8E1E4
Senior Software Engineer - Solutions Engineering           iranzo @ IRC
RHC{A,SS,DS,VA,E,SA,SP,AOSP}, JBCAA        #110-215-852    RHCA Level V

Blog: https://iranzo.github.io                     https://citellus.org
Telegram: https://t.me/iranzo                   https://t.me/redken_bot
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