Hi,
In a corporate environment we are not allowed to use DHCP/PXE for doing network
installations. This means we have to look for other solutions. Our solution is
to use an ISO image (mounted via a KVM solution) to kick off the network
installation.
A big problem currently is that the order of the network interfaces is
arbitrary (depends on the order of the drivers loaded) and is not influence by
the order of the PCI slots. So in our case we have a bunch of e1000, bnx2 and
tg3 in systems we have to install.
The first onboard interface (usually tg3 or bnx2) almost never is eth0, but
instead can be eth2, eth3 or higher. (Depending on the number of
"other" NICs)
This is problematic because Anaconda never gives a very good analysis of why
the download of the kickstart fails. Very unpleasant if you want system
deployements done by Service Operations.
So our solution was to provide ksdevice=MAC-ADDRESS , which works fine in the
first phase for downloading the kickstart file, but then the kickstart file
again has a network-directive with a --device= parameter to configure
the network again in the second phase.
Here is where the trouble starts.
The --device= cannot handle MAC addresses, in other words if we ommit
the --device= parameter we get a list of interfaces, which we do not
want because the list does not indicate which one is the right interface.
Using ksdevice=bootif and providing BOOTIF=MAC-ADDRESS on the commandline
does not help either because the second phase always wants to reconfigure the
network.
In fact we don't want the second phase to reconfigure the network, we want
it
to keep the working network configuration from the first phase which
worked fine for downloading the kickstart file.
So here's my question:
Is there a way to have the second phase network configuration NOT take
place, or have it use the interface that was correctly downloading the
kickstart file ?
I could not find it anywhere and none of my tests seem to indicate that this is
at all possible.
This is on RHEL/CentOS 4.6.
--
-- dag wieers, dag at wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
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Dag Wieers wrote:> In a corporate environment we are not allowed to use DHCP/PXE for > doing network installations. This means we have to look for other > solutions. Our solution is to use an ISO image (mounted via a KVM > solution) to kick off the network installation. > > A big problem currently is that the order of the network interfaces is > arbitrary (depends on the order of the drivers loaded) and is not > influence by the order of the PCI slots. So in our case we have a > bunch of e1000, bnx2 and tg3 in systems we have to install.Dag, I ASSuME that different interfaces are plugged into different switch ports on a switch supporting VLANs? Perhaps the same switch for all ports. Can you set up those ports, so that for install, they are all on the same VLAN? So it would not matter which interface is used for the install, the IP address you assign it will work on it? My home lab has a number of HP ProCurves, and I will get into the management interface, and set which vlan a port is on if I need to do some installs.
-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
Behalf
Of Dag Wieers
Sent: Sunday, September 28, 2008 4:59 PM
To: centos at centos.org
Subject: [CentOS] Network installation from CD
Hi,
In a corporate environment we are not allowed to use DHCP/PXE for doing
network installations. This means we have to look for other solutions. Our
solution is to use an ISO image (mounted via a KVM solution) to kick off the
network installation.
A big problem currently is that the order of the network interfaces is
arbitrary (depends on the order of the drivers loaded) and is not influence
by the order of the PCI slots. So in our case we have a bunch of e1000, bnx2
and
tg3 in systems we have to install.
The first onboard interface (usually tg3 or bnx2) almost never is eth0, but
instead can be eth2, eth3 or higher. (Depending on the number of
"other"
NICs) This is problematic because Anaconda never gives a very good analysis
of why the download of the kickstart fails. Very unpleasant if you want
system deployements done by Service Operations.
So our solution was to provide ksdevice=MAC-ADDRESS , which works fine in
the first phase for downloading the kickstart file, but then the kickstart
file again has a network-directive with a --device= parameter to configure
the network again in the second phase.
Here is where the trouble starts.
The --device= cannot handle MAC addresses, in other words if we ommit the
--device= parameter we get a list of interfaces, which we do not want
because the list does not indicate which one is the right interface.
Using ksdevice=bootif and providing BOOTIF=MAC-ADDRESS on the
commandline does not help either because the second phase always wants to
reconfigure the network.
In fact we don't want the second phase to reconfigure the network, we want
it to keep the working network configuration from the first phase which
worked fine for downloading the kickstart file.
So here's my question:
Is there a way to have the second phase network configuration NOT take
place, or have it use the interface that was correctly downloading the
kickstart file ?
I could not find it anywhere and none of my tests seem to indicate that this
is at all possible.
This is on RHEL/CentOS 4.6.
---------------------------------------------------------------
JohnStanley Writes:
I thought this issue was fixed in the 2.6.55 release kernel. Also Some where
I came across where there is an option to KS.cfg to use the first available
network connection there is and that was supposed to solve the delima. Maybe
not solved in the 4 release. I had this problem with Dell Servers.
Option is to use a local floppy/cdrom/whatnot and specify "network
--bootproto=dhcp --device=eth0" which you probally don't want.
JohnStanley
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On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 16:59, Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> wrote:> Is there a way to have the second phase network configuration NOT take > place,Not that I know of.> or have it use the interface that was correctly downloading the > kickstart file ?Yes! I do something similar here. I use a script to generate the "network" line, because I want to choose my IPs and netmasks during installation and I don't want to hardcode them in the ks.cfg file. Here is what I do: I create a %pre section to ks.cfg, this will be a script (in my case a Python script) that will ask the user for any needed information. Then it will look up the boot-up interface by looking at /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf and choosing the first entry that starts with "eth", then it will generate a "network" line and save it to /tmp/netconfig. Then, before on the ks.cfg file, where the network configuration is expected, I use a %include /tmp/netconfig For me, it works like a charm! Let us know if you try it and it works for you. HTH, Filipe