Chris Lumens wrote:
1. Look at local media (floppy, usb, ??) for a ks file. If one is found,
use it. By way of reference to another authority, this is what Windows
does.
I don't really like the idea of making kickstart file use quite this
Why not? Let's examine your objections.
automatic. We've already got ks= that's easy to toss into PXE boot
arguments and so forth. I suppose we could do some work on making it so
that ks=floppy automatically probes for a floppy drive, etc. though.
My preference is
1. Insert standard CD/DVD
2. Power up.
3. Select (from BIOS) "Boot from CD.
4. Walk away.
A sane value for filename might be the install URL, or the ks file. Use of
other information such as log-servers, time-offset and ntp-servers would be
beneficial (the filesystem would have correct timestamps that really
reflect the time of the install).
Implementation of one or both of these would mean that users could do
automatic installs with standard media, without having to key potentially
long and fairly meaningless strings of data such as the URL to an install
server.
I'm all for making these sorts of things more automatic, however. Would
you believe me if I said we are already at least partially using values
out of DHCP for the kickstart file location:
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=anaconda.git;a=blob;f=loader2/nfsinstall.c#l400
Doubledutch to me. Where is it documented? Is thatjust for nfs? Does it
work for http (my usual install method)?
There's probably a lot more we can do there, though. I don't think this
area has seen much activity at all lately.
As for using the other DHCP values like for ntp-servers, I'll have to
defer to David for how easy that might be. I'm not really familiar with
the DHCP side of things.
DHCP is used to configure (sub)network-wide information. The source of
time is one, log servers is another. It makes sense to honour the system
administrator's mandate.
If I say to use "192.168.9.4" as the time source then I expect ntp
clients to use that, not time.apple.com, time.redhat.com or
pool.ntp.org. Those might be (and are, on my systems) blocked by
firewalls. (I also don't expect to have to manually select to use the
DHCP-supplied value later, that's craezee).
You'd be familiar with IP address, netmask, gateway. There's heaps more
stuff can be specified, including Vendor's inventions. If you have a
look at the latest etherboot, you will see it includes PXE software now,
and that it can accept an URL as file name and do http to get the file.
--
Cheers
John
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