Redhat – DRAC virtual floppy and kickstart

drackickstartredhat

Situation: I've got some machines with Dell iDRAC6 Enterprises that I need to kickstart remotely.

Usually, I'd go to the datacenter, jam the CD and floppy (with ks.cfg) in the machine, and be on my way. The last build I did, I "burnt" the ISO onto a flash drive with UNetBootin, jammed all the kickstarts on the root of the same flash drive, and was able to boot with "linux ks=hd:sdb1:/hostname-ks.cfg." Problem is, I'm doing everything remotely now.

I've loaded up the DRAC interface and mounted both the floppy with ks.cfg and RHEL netboot CD mounted. It boots off the CD, but when I do

linux ks=floppy

The kickstart can't be located and it proceeds into the regular non-automated installation.

I've also tried "linux ks=fd0:/ks.cfg," "linux ks=hd:fd0:/ks.cfg," and a few other permutations, to no avail.

I think if I could figure out what the device names for the virtual CD and floppy that the DRAC presents to the system are, I'd be in good shape.

Best Answer

I had the same problem, though it was for installing an ESXi:

  • The Virtal Floppy is considered as generic USB storage (seen in /var/log/messages)
  • The USB device need to have a FAT16/FAT32 partition (seen in /usr/lib/vmware/weasel/usbmedia.py), but it looks specific.

Context:

  • iDRAC 6 v3.2
  • VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.1.0.update1-348481.x86_64-Dell_Customized_A04.iso

Here are the rough steps:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=ks.img bs=1000 count=32000 
$ fdisk ks.img

Create partition and note start*512 as offset (1048576 here) ; Change partition type to FAT16

$ losetup -o1048576 /dev/loop0 ks.img
$ mkdosfs /dev/loop0
$ mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/tmp
$ cp ks.cfg /mnt/tmp
$ umount /mnt/tmp
$ losetup -d /dev/loop0

Then add ks=usb on ESXi boot command line.

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