[Spacewalk-list] OpenSUSE on Spacewalk Kickstart

[Jonathan Hoser]

Dear all - and esp. Dear SUSE team,

we are currently trying to get openSUSE running on Spacewalk,
and I was wondering if any of you have pointers
for a smooth how-to or similar.

What we got so far:
Channels,
Distro (*)
Kickstart,
Booting, and PreLoading

a) Distro has a *, because, it was a bit tricky here.
We could not get the preinstall system to run on Spacewalk2.1,
as it kept telling us there's no network interface to install from.

Research pointed us to include the "install=<FQDN>/[...]" parameter in
the Distro,
which was twice silently removed, and on the third try, the
SUSE-handling kicked in (my guess),
and now we have it twice.
Works, but I wanted to mention our experience with it.

b) Once a) had been overcome, we managed to boot the PXE installation
into the graphical installer, where openSUSE would then complain
about the autoyast-download link not to be found:

The baremetal-provisioning system for the system had created a cobbler
entry like
"pcxx1.domain.de:1"
where the installer tried to get the file from "...../pcxx1.domain.de%3a1"
which is not correctly handled by apache/cobbler, as such the
delivery/download of the kickstart file fails.

Changing the hostname to something without ":" solved that.
However, now the openSUSE installer complains about the kickstart
not containing a start-tag "<" for the autoyast configuration.

How is this supposed to be handled?
We tried embedding an autoyast xml (with all appropriate tags etc) into
the kickstart file,
but that did not work.

We cheated cobbler and spacewalk by manually editing the cobbler-created
boot-entries
and pointing the autoyast parameter to a file in spacewalks' apaches'
pub-Dir;

That did work, until cobbler rewrote its config.
But at least, we did get an openSUSE install, so we know it IS possible.

Then again, it did not trigger the 'no-more-netboot' cobbler routine,
which meant, the system reinstalled afterwards.

Ok, but our custom cobbler-config was gone by then.

So, does any of you have a pointer or even a written howto?
Google did not help me sofar (haven't found a lot concerning
SLES/openSUSE on spacewalk),
but I figured, I just try with you guys!

Best
-Jonathan

--
Jonathan Hoser, M.Sc.
Institute of Bioinformatics and System Biology

WWW: http://mips.helmholtz-muenchen.de


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