Kickstart: reference floppy drive via %ksappend or %include

anacondakickstartvmware-esxi

Having trouble getting %ksappend or %include to work when referencing a local floppy drive.

Booting off remote server's cd-rom drive I am able to load the CentOS 6 minimal install image, and then add ks=hd:fd0/ks-jvm.cfg to boot params to load kickstart init file from floppy disk. That works fine.

The problem is that I want to load a streamlined generic init file off the floppy and then, within the init, %ksappend or %include specific config files relative to the type of server I'm building (JVM, MySQL, Apache, etc.)

I do not have DHCP, networking needs to be specified statically, so %ksappend and %include both fail when attempting to reference http://some-LAN-IP/foo.cfg since networking has not yet been set.

The kickstart setup only works when I glob in the entire config into a single file, which is great, but ugly and difficult to maintain when I return later, having forgotten the original setup.

At this point I'd be happy if I could get %ksappend or %include working with a floppy drive reference in the %post section; that would consolidate a lot of common boilerplate that all kickstarts will rely on (sshd_config, rsync config, resolve.conf, and so on)

Thanks for providing the magic floppy drive reference that is eluding me!

Best Answer

OK, the solution is to break out your hammer and bash anaconda (or oneself for not knowing the answer) over the head:

%pre
mkdir -p /tmp/floppy
mount /dev/fd0 /tmp/floppy
%end

Now the floppy is accessible for %include -- unattended installer at work as I type here ;-)

Going to try this with %ksappend as it appears this directive provides more flexibility/power.

Major hassle getting setup with kickstart on a remote ESXi machine, but once in place it is a pretty nice reusable solution...

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