Caetano, Greg wrote:
Is it possible with cobbler to not have the "ks=" or "autoyast=" kernel parameters added to the pxelinux menu for a given profile? I'm trying have a pxelinux boot entry for a firmware update option and am running into too long of a line for the append parameters. Thanks Greg Greg Caetano HP TSG Linux Solutions Alliances Engineering Chicago, IL greg.caetano@xxxxxx Red Hat Certified Engineer RHCE#803004972711193 _______________________________________________ et-mgmt-tools mailing list et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
That defeats the purpose of fully automatic installation, doesn't it? For PXE, the "ks=" line cannot be removed. However, yes, I think I can help you with your problem.
If you have an older cobbler install that you've upgraded, you probably have a few kernel options in /var/lib/cobbler/settings which are not required and can be removed, but in newer installs, there aren't many that can be removed to save space. Current cobbler defaults to "lang= ksdevice=eth0 text" as default options. Also, for the last several cobbler releases, the kickstart arguments are shortened a good bit.
It would probably be helpful to see what arguments are on your kernel command line (you can obtain this by reading /var/www/cobbler/profiles/$filename or looking at /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg -- without seeing what you have, I can't really suggest what I would remove or what might be specifiable in kickstart instead of the kernel command line.
Aside: As I mentioned above, koan doesn't use the ks= parameter for --replace-self. Why? Because in a lot of situations, DHCP timeouts cause problems, and in this case, we can help avoid them. What koan's --replace-self does is download the intended initrd, crack it open, and insert a kickstart file back into the initrd. So, technically, yes, this could be done in cobbler for PXE cases as well. However, there is a disadvantage to doing this: diskspace and long sync times. Cobbler sync would take about 30 seconds for each profile and system as it cracked open the files, and every profile and system would require storage of a custom initrd on the filesystem. This is very undesirable especially when managing thousands of systems. So, if you need to do reinstalls, use --replace-self, but embedding the kickstart in the initrd is not a good thing to perform client side. However, if this is something you are really interested in, patching cobbler to allow initrd managling is doable -- and I'd consider a patch to allow this as an option. Using it would require that minimize_syncs be disabled, so that synchronization (which would be really lengthy) could be run in batch. Anyhow, this isn't a super-great way to solve the length problem, and is a bit weird, so that's not ideal.
As I've said, as I really don't know what your kernel command line options are, I can't tell why they are so long ... but maybe I can help if you share them.
FYI -- if you can, send questions to et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx so more people can benefit from answers. If it's to be not showing @hp.com on a public
list, a lot of folks use gmail accounts for this kind of thing. --Michael
