[Spacewalk-list] Several Kickstart questions

[Will Beldman]

Hi Everyone,

I'm very new to both Spacewalk (using v2.2) and Kickstart. I'm trying to 
stumble through my first CentOS 7 kickstart. I'd like to avoid manual 
customizations as much as I can so I have a few questions:

1. I've got as far as successfully completing a kickstart and it automatically 
registers the host in Spacewalk. At this point, I would like the machine to 
disable any locally configured repos and depend on Spacewalk only. Should I 
create my own post script to do this?

2. So I manually disable locally configured repos and it is using Spacewalk 
only, but I cannot run updates locally. yum update gives the standard GPG key 
error message:
==================
	You have enabled checking of packages via GPG keys. This is a good 
thing...
	...
	rpm --import public.gpg.key
	...
	Problem repository: centos-7-64bit
==================
I see from the generated kickstart file, in the post script, the Spacewalk 
cert is being dropped in /usr/share/rhn/RHN-ORG-TRUSTED-SSL-CERT but no rpm --
import line for it. There is a line to do:
	rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release
But since this is CentOS, this doesn't do anything.
Is this normal? Should I also add an rpm --import line in another customized 
post script?

3. We do not use DHCP in our environment so I am kickstarting via static IP 
and I need to set kickstart to use static as well. I have manually updated the 
network advanced option to:
	--bootproto=static --ip=$IP --netmask=$NM --gateway=$GW --hostname=$HN --
nameserver=$NS1 --nameserver=$NS2 --nameserver=$NS3
and I added variables to match my specific host. First of all, it looks like 
my nameservers are being ignored. My kickstarted machine is using the 
nameserver I specified at boot time when I kickstarted it and not the three I 
set here. Second, does this approach make sense? I see it listed as an example 
in some documentation (https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Network_Satellite/5.3/html/Reference_Guide/s1-cobbler-templates.html#s2-cobbler-templates-usage), but I also see that are snippets 
listed in my Spacewalk server that I could take advantage of?:
	network_config 	$SNIPPET('network_config')
	post_install_network_config 	$SNIPPET('post_install_network_config')
	pre_install_network_config 	$SNIPPET('pre_install_network_config') 
Should I configure the network settings in the kickstart config or can I be 
prompted for that in the installer? Or can I get the machine to assume the 
boot parameters I supplied for the network configuration?

4. On that subject, how do I use snippets in kickstart through Spacewalk? 
There are a handful there and a bunch I can find online. Spacewalk says: "TIP: 
Copy and paste the snippet macro into your kickstart profiles to make the full 
snippet appear in that kickstart profile."
Okay, where? In the advanced options? Do I download my automatically generated 
kickstart file, modify it, and re-upload it?

5. Is it common to have one kickstart config per machine? Every time I want to 
spin up a new machine, should I clone a "base" kickstart profile and modify 
the settings appropriately to make it machine specific? Or is it possible to 
template a kickstart profile enough to have exactly one to work from. In the 
end, at least for now, I would be looking for every kickstarted machine to be 
identical except for network configuration and root password.

6. I checked off "Enable Spacewalk Configuration Management" and "Enable 
Spacewalk Remote Commands" but rhncfg-actions does not get installed so this 
cannot be working. I can manually add the package to the list of software to 
be installed but this should not be necessary.

Help on any of these questions would be greatly appreciated.