[Spacewalk-list] kickstart, cobbler and hostnames

[Lachlan Musicman]

Hola,

I've found a number of ideas online about how to inject the hostname into a
kickstart'ed installation, but I'm still unable to get a server to boot
using a hostname that isn't generic.  I don't have admin access to the DNS
or DHCP server, so I can't use either of those.

I have tried a post install script, but that failed to change the hostname.

There is the pre-script pass as kernel parameter option, which I don't like
much

http://monzell.com/post/15547967527/automatically-set-the-hostname-during-kickstart

and the network config line which I'm also ambivalent on:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=285238

given that I want dynamic names (if I launch 20 servers from the same
profile, I want them to have unique hostnames that aren't
localhost.localdomain). Neither of these systems is dynamic enough for
this, unless I'm missing something?

I found this email:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/spacewalk-list/2015-July/msg00054.html

which lead me to "3.1.4.6. Adding a System to Cobbler" here
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Satellite/5.6/html/Getting_Started_Guide/chap-Getting_Started_Guide-System_Provisioning.html

I created a pool of MAC addresses and then added them as cobbler systems, I
regenerated the generated.iso - but the systems that are booting aren't
getting the "cobbler system" that was created for each of them?

I'm not 100% sure at which point the "cobbler system" should be taking
control - I'm still getting a boot menu with a list of KS profiles to
choose from, despite each cobbler system being associated with a ks
profile...

What am I doing wrong or not understanding wrt cobbler systems? Is it
because my NICs are vNICS and therefore the MAC addresses are ...?

If, alternatively, I was to do something in a %post, like this

%post --nochroot
echo $hostname > /mnt/sysimage/home/hostname

(as found here:

http://serverfault.com/questions/608544/passing-variables-in-kickstart )

I presume I could apply hostnames depending on the MAC address, which
presumably I can get in %post via # ifconfig | grep ether | awk '{print
$2}' or somesuch






Cheers
L.





------
The most dangerous phrase in the language is, "We've always done it this
way."

- Grace Hopper
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