> Never knew %traceback existed. Someone else mentioned it was not documented. I'll take care of that in pykickstart github which means it will eventually filter down into the other Fedora and RHEL guides. The summary is it's just like any other kickstart script, except it runs if anaconda hits a traceback. It's useful for reporting problems with the installation process, writing tests, that sort of thing. It's probably less useful for end users but you never know. > Because of our use of Cobbler, it comes prebuilt with some rather > lengthy %post and %pre sections. We actually have two main classes of > kickstarts - our RAID kickstart and our OS kickstart. Talking to the cobbler guys is on my list, after I sort through some more of this kickstart-list email. > In our OS kickstart, some of these things include: > In %pre: > - Sending logs off the system ( Cobbler accomplishes this via a > python script called anamon ). This allows us for remote monitoring > of the logs. Hah, anamon. Oh, that brings up memories. > - We call out to specific webhooks in both %pre and %post, as part of > our orchestration triggers/process Is this something we could do for you, or is it so very specific that there'd be no point? > - We do a bunch of a disk detection. I have a recent thread on here > about what we're trying to accomplish - but trying to find the first > disk in the BIOS boot order is a *pain* I will go back in the archives and take a look. > In %post: > - Adding custom yum repos that we want for the installation only This behavior changes all the time. On master at least, what should be happening is that your repo is only used for installation unless you use repo --install. So you should be able to use the repo command for this (depending on what release you are targeting). > - Continuing to send off logs to some out of band logging mechanism Are you able to use the logging command here? If not, is there something we could add to it to make it more useful? > - Calling certain webhooks/triggers at the start and the end of %post Same question as for %pre - could we do this for you? > One of the hangups we've had > is that there are no ipmi tools available ( or installable ) in this > pseudo-OS environment, so we can't tell the host to PXE boot itself > again ( in case the network isn't first in the boot order ). Because > of this, we're looking to move away from this configuration and using > a real OS ( like alpine, tinylinux or something along the lines of the > project hanlon microkernel ) I don't know if this will help you, but at least in RHEL 7.2 and recent Fedoras, ipmitool is present. > #1 - Better/consistent documentation about the lesser known features. Yep, this is definitely high up on my list of things to do. > #2 - Probably the thing that has caused the most headaches is the > difficulty in using/starting utilities/services that require kernel > modules, such as iptables or ipmi. I don't know if we can do anything about this. > That and disk detection/boot > ordering has proven rather flaky. There's the --onbiosdisk option, > but it doesn't always work. I'm not if making it more like a language > would be helpful - that would probably depend on entirely how useful > the language was. We've taken steps across several releases (going back into RHEL6 at least) to let you specify disks in other formats besides simply /dev/sda. You can use /dev/disk/by-id/whatever, for instance. Basically you can use anything that udev sets up. Has any of this been useful in dealing with disk ordering problems? > #3 - We probably don't need it because of our use of Cobbler/Cheetah, > but perhaps some way of providing an attribute file to download on the > kickstart command line, and then being able to use the key=values in > that attribute file to templatize/fill in values in the kickstart > file. Yep, this is a variation on the theme of providing system information to both the installer and to the server with the kickstart file. I'll make a note of it. - Chris _______________________________________________ Kickstart-list mailing list Kickstart-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/kickstart-list
