[Spacewalk-list] Kickstart Difficulties - Networking

[Andy Speagle]

On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 09:04 -0500, Andy Speagle wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 08:48 -0500, Jeremy Mueller wrote:
> > Andy,
> > 
> > Try setting your network line to something like:
> > 
> > --bootproto query --device eth0 --bootproto static --noipv6
> --netmask
> > <mask> --gateway <gw> --nameserver <dns1>,<dns2>
> > 
> > This should query you for if you want to use DHCP or manually set
> the
> > ip, then you can tell it to manually set the settings, then it'll
> fill
> > in all the fields you want, only leaving the IP field for you to
> fill
> > in.
> > 
> > We found that during the kickstart, if DHCP is available, the
> install
> > would default back to DHCP, even if you manually configure the IPs.
> > The "--bootproto query" solved this for us.
> > 
> > --Jeremy
> 
> Ok, that's good to know.  I thought I had tried that before, but
> perhaps
> not.  I've solved this for now for myself.  Instead of muck with
> anaconda's eccentricities, I engineered out the problem.  
> 
> What I'm doing instead is appending a parameter to the PXE boot line
> that means nothing to any part of the installer ala:
> 
> destip=<ip>
> 
> Then... a simple non-chroot post-install script passes this into the
> chroot environment..
> 
> cat /proc/cmdline | tr ' ' '\n' | grep ^destip | sed 's/destip=//'
> > /mnt/sysimage/root/ipaddr.install
> 
> Then without the gory details, I'm essentially using that IP to make
> modifications to the key config files during post-install.  Such as...
> 
> Add entry to /etc/hosts
> Mod /etc/sysconfig/network
> Mod /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<intf>
> 
> So... with the common network config pre-filled in the kickstart,
> anaconda uses the IP from DHCP to do the install and I clean it up at
> the end.
> 
> Probably not super-elegant, but it makes my admins only have to dink
> with one variable in the PXE boot menu when they select the kickstart
> to
> use.

Sorry to dredge up something old, but I wanted to comment on another
solution that I came up with... something a bit more elegant.  What I
found was happening is that even though the endstate of the new OS was
that the hostname was configured properly, at no point during the
post-install portion did the installer know the correct hostname.  What
this meant is that the system would register itself as "unknown" ..
which is always extra-helpful.

So, instead I added a kernel option to the kickstart "distribution" in
Spacewalk that included:

netmask=<mask> gateway=<gw> dns=<dns1>,<dns2>

This allowed me to manually append the target IP via:

ip=<ip>

to the PXE boot line ... such that the installer could do the
reverse-lookup and set everything up properly.

Magic.

Thanks again.

-Andy
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